Recommend Me A Distro

[zythyl]

It will be for a small laptop using Eclipse programming tools and some other numerous word applications for note-taking.

Was thinking Ubuntu as NEVER USED LINUX BEFORE.

Any tips?

[Thrillhouse]

Pretty much any distro will do if those are your only requirements. Ubuntu works as a good intro for new Linux users.

Any tips?

Yes. If you're serious about Java development, make sure you install Sun's Java and not the GNU alternative. A quick Google search reveals this HOW-TO.

[zythyl]

Well I don't want to feel like a child using Ubuntu as I've started using it at Uni. Is theier a distro the programmers call "home"?

[Thrillhouse]

Is theier a distro the programmers call "home"?

Not really. I think most developers just want everything to be set up to their liking. Which distro that environment is set up in is immaterial.

[techieMoe]

Not really. I think most developers just want everything to be set up to their liking. Which distro that environment is set up in is immaterial.

I second that. In college just about every programmer I knew had a different "favorite" distribution. At my job it's the same way. I use Ubuntu, we have a SuSE guy and a Fedora guy. It's all personal preference. They're all perfectly capable of being a programmer's box.

[zythyl]

*question answered*

[zythyl]

another question: what's the best CLI Linux distro? or can i just install the kernel and use cli through that?

[i92guboj]

Well I don't want to feel like a child using Ubuntu as I've started using it at Uni. Is theier a distro the programmers call "home"?

Not really, though I have found Gentoo to be particularly suitable for such purposes. It's not the most straightforward distro for a newcomer to the linux world, though, but I know some people without linux experience which proficiently use it without any major problem.

Pretty much any distro will do if those are your only requirements. Ubuntu works as a good intro for new Linux users.

Yes. If you're serious about Java development, make sure you install Sun's Java and not the GNU alternative. A quick Google search reveals this HOW-TO.

That's right, just a couple of notes there:

If you are talking about the blackdown variant, it's not really GNU software. It's also owned by Sun, and licensed with a custom Sun license, called something like "sun-bcla-java-vm".

You can also use the 1.6 java stuff from Sun, which is open source.

[i92guboj]

another question: what's the best CLI Linux distro? or can i just install the kernel and use cli through that?

I don't know what do you mean by "the best CLI distro". Any distro has exactly the same tools available for the final user. The linux CLI stuff is mostly standard. The only difference might be the default shell that a distro uses.

The kernel by itself will be of no use to you. You need at least a small set of tools to be able to do anything useful with linux. And to issue commands, you need a command interpreter, usually called "shell".

Most distros use the "bash" shell nowadays, which is based on the unix "sh" shell. "ksh" and "zsh" are also famous. "csh" is something to avoid in my opinion.