RE: Newbie/Wannabe

["Koji Hayakawa" <sylf00@example.com>]

-----Original Message-----
From: Rod Holmes [mailto:rod@example.com]
>2. If I do go with Linux, where in Tokyo can I get a cheap box
>    to put it on? Would it be okay to just buy a used PC off of
>    someone in Tokyo Classified? I'm getting an ADSL line
>    installed soon (there IS an Easter bunny!) that I'll connect
>    to--which might have some impact on this question.

Cheap PC works great as a development web server for me.  My buddy and I use
Pentium133 with 48MB RAM (100MB swap) to run Apache/PHP/MySQL as our
development site.  It's blazing fast for me, as long as I don't do something
crazy.

>3. What flavor of Linux should I (as a newest of newbies having
>    never compiled anything in my life). I read on this list some
>    time ago someone dissing Mandrake because it took shortcuts
>    in order to make loading easy. Easy sounds great to me!

If you can work with X windows, then there's a few that are sort of easy to
get started with.
As far as installation goes, any current, major distro should go fairy
smooth.  Slackware, Redhat, Turbo Linux, and Caldera are what I've tried
recently, and they are equally easy for me.   For me, Caldera was just great
on setting everything up with minimum hasstle, but I don't like how they use
proprietary software packages (Modified version of standard softwares).
But if you are stuck with console only (like if you are just telnet'ing like
me), the learning curve can be a bit steep.  You might wanna go buy some
Linux beginner guide or two.

>4. Any other advice? Easy text editors? Easy FTP clients?

Heck, if you are just editing HTML, why not stick with Mac, use your favorit
editor and FTP files you edit as you go?  I do that on my windows machine,
if I'm not using "vi" on linux.  (Of course, learning vi can be very
tricky....  "pico" is really easy to learn for many people)

I hope that helps


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