[PLUG] Moving from CP/M to Linux

[Keith Lofstrom]

On Wed, Jan 11, 2012 at 09:28:02PM -0800, tim at wescottdesign.com wrote:
> Richard has a long commute.  He lives out past Estacada, even.

Near Springfield MO, apparently.  A bit of googling revealed
this thread from April 2011:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/groups/south-west-missouri-linux-users-group/

Apparently "amsweitzer", about 30 miles west of Richard
in Lawrence County, is talking about setting up "SWMLUG"
... which I suppose could double as "Single White Male",
an amply represented portion of our community.

Windows comes out of a box, linux comes out of a community. 
One of the best parts of Linux is hanging out with other
Linux users, swapping CDs and hardware and lies.  While
some of us are quite happy being Moody Loners with
Keyboards, it can be fun to sit down in pairs or threes
and attack problems together.  Sometimes it is essential;
if your only computer is hosed, how do you google for 
repair ideas?  Much easier with helpful friends.

Richard is certainly welcome on this list, and there are
a few ancient CP/M geeks on it.  Another Portland CP/M
geek, Jim Willing, moved to Yates Center, KS, to run a
bowling alley.  Perhaps Jim is still around, and ready
to drive two hours east for SWMLUG.

I suggest Richard picks a distro that offers both "texty"
and "gui" ways to get things done.  Do the config with
the gui, in the beginning.  Then see what files the gui
changes.  That gives two views of the same information.

Avoid like the plague any distro that keeps configuration
in non-standard files, filters them through a GUI, to 
make write-only linux configs.   There are a very few
files like that in Redhat distros, more in some of the
oddball "user friendly" distros.
      
Ubuntu is a good way to get started.  The community is
helpful and welcoming of newbies.  After that, the various
clones of Redhat Enterprise are interesting, mostly because
CentOS is the engine underneath so many application specific
distros - a lot of production software ported to CentOS.
After that, if Richard is feeling ubergeeky, skip Debian
and others and go straight to Gentoo - build your own
binaries from source.  Unless  Richard wants to go all
the way to programming with solder.  Starting out with
RHEL/CentOS is like learning to drive on a bulldozer.

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs