Will probably be at installfest, but not sure which distro I want.

[Jerry Feldman]

On Sun, 30 Jul 2006 07:56:52 -0400
"Laurence Guild" <guildl at rcn.com> wrote:

> 
> I would like to go to install fest. Will there be distros available there ? If so, which might most likely be there ? I'm not sure which distro I want. should I possibly download several different distros onto my machine and then discuss at install fest further which I should use ? If certain distros are likey to be there, then perhaps I would bring some other alternatives to those ?
> 
> I am familiar with unix in that I worked on an AIX for many years and SUN OS/solaris as well. 
> 
> I am a programmer, mainly interested in Perl, Ruby, Java, C++, etc. I'm doing this for my resume, experience, and possible work. Also, a distro that I could eventually decide to use instead of windows for word processing, email, browsing the web and so on might be good. I want to be able to put linux on my resume and use my laptop with linux to do telecommuting type work if needed for various companies that require linux and I have a particular interest in web type work with Ruby, Perl/CGI, etc.  I've looked at the linux.org listing and there are so many distros to chose from that I allmost don't know where to start. I am planning to research it further, it's just I am affraid I am going to have a hard time deciding. I want to maintain a windows partition.

I too am a C/C++/Assembler programmer.
Guaranteed that there will be Fedora Core 5 as well as SuSE 10.0 and
SuSE 10.1. Both SuSE 10.0 and SuSE 10.1 worked on my 64-bit HP laptop.
I have all 3 above distros on DVD, and JABR sometimes sets up a
networked server. In general the basic dristros below also have some
derivatives, especially Debian.
SuSE - includes OpenSuSE as well as enterprise
RedHat - Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise
Debian - Debian, Ubuntu, GenTOO , KNoppix

I would grab a Knoppix bootable CD and repartition your drive with 1
partition for Windows giving it enough size to run Windows. (QTParted
is a useful tool). I usually then create an Extended partition in one
of the remaining 3 primary partitions. I then usually recommend
creating of at least 3 logical partitions:
/ - Root partition (You probably want to make this 8GB minimum)
/home - User directories 
swap - 2 or 3 times memory.
I sometimes also add a /usr/local.

Some distros like to create a separate /boot partition. I rarely do,
and there are some good reasons to create it as well as good reasons
not to. The /boot contains the kernel, initrd and GRUB - boot loader.

Most of the distros will resize the Windows partition and respect
partitions that exist if you use the automatic installation. I almost
always do manual. You also may consider using LVM since it is more
flexible when resizing, but I generally use hard file systems.

-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9
PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9
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