Any home users on the list?

[Dave Ihnat]

On Thu, Nov 24, 2005 at 02:21:56PM -0800, Jason Riker wrote:
> Hello again.  I'm relatively new to the list and was wondering how many
> (if any) others are using RHEL as a home OS?

I've been working on Unix since about 1980; at one point, I was teaching
Unix internals at Bell Labs.  I started running SVR2 at home around 1982
or '83--an Altos 7, then a 3B1 (lots of hardware hacking!), and finally
the Dell release of SVR2 with mucho early GNU.

I knew about Linux in its early days, but it was too raw to do anything
professional with it.  Then I checked it out again around 6.0, and found
a pleasant surprise--it reminded me a lot of Unix in the '80s, especially
the fervent advocacy and rapid development.  I ran 5.2, then 6.1 as my
firewall/ server, and played with development machines through release 9.

I've found, however, that Redhat's stiffer pricing has made it a harder
sell at clients; SuSE has gone over better, although I'm moving more
Dell servers with RHEL now.

For home learning/use, I don't know that you really get that much more
buying RHEL--I don't think you get enough to justify the cost at home--but
Fedora has come to the point I'd recommend it with few reservations.
(The only real problem I have is that I couldn't ever really turn
Fedora loose on a client site that doesn't have an in-house IT staff;
I could do that with pre-RHEL Redhat distributions.)  There are also
still some real shortcomings that prevent full replacement of Windows
in some environments--especially in the area of VPN compatibility.

But the real point, I guess, is that the only way to learn Uni--er, Linux--
it to get your hands on it.  Run aids like Webmin to get started, but crawl
under the sheets and dig around in the underlying config files and system
architecture--including source--to really get a handle on how it all flies.

Above all, have fun!
--
	Dave Ihnat
	ignatz at dminet.com