Well. I’ve been working with Linux lately trying to understand its in’s-and-out’s. At work they won’t allow me to connect a machine running Linux on it to the production network. I think I’m going to just borrow a machine and hook it up at home.
Today I installed the Slackware Linux 9.0 distribution, thus removing the Core Linux distribution. I still don’t have any grasp of all the various things that I have installed on here. I’m not sure if I need the Postscript things I’ve seen, but I’m figuring that there may sooner or later be some sort of dependencies on those packages, so I just let the Slackware install program install everything, except for Gnome and KDE.
I figured that if I can’t have a server connected to the network to remotely ssh or VNC into, then a laptop with a full distribution would be the answer. I’d much rather build the system up fr! om scratch so that I learn the dependencies for various programs.
With the Slackware distribution it was a piece of cake to get the PCMCIA ethernet card I’m using to work, and I’ll be happy to just SSH/VNC into this laptop I’m borrowing from my Windows-XP PC.
Linux is quite a mess with the various configurations of software, libraries, and configuration file settings each distribution has. I can’t wait to learn to tell the consistencies of the operating system from the chaos between distributions. For example, I’m assuming that every Linux distribution has VI on it, but I like NANO…which was there by default on the Core distro I was using. I’ll just install it on this system…or learn to use VI.