penta-booting hard-disk: who would administer the hard-disk office?

[Ed Greshko]

On 11/26/2011 12:04 AM, Linux Tyro wrote:
>
>> Years ago I ran an LUG internal to a company and it helped the new hires
>> learn the ins and outs.
> You do still ran that? How often you come to India or you have ever been to?

I don't do that any longer.  I used to go to Mumbai, Bangalore, and 
Chennai.
>> Of course you can install openSuse.  I'm just surprised that, being a
>> beginner, you'd install that distro when their community seemed a bit
>> hostile when it came to, what they felt, were basic questions that could
>> be easily answered by doing a bit of research.
> Yeah, I could have Googled but that showed me terrific results and for
> a newbie, it was painful so I got afraid in the beginning.

Since you like to quote what others have said:  "No pain, no gain".  
Besides, IMO, one learns more by trial and error than having someone 
tell you what to do.  That is another reason I like the VM method.  You 
can take a snapshot of your system and if you completely mess it up all 
you have to do is restore it from the snapshot.

>
>> I still like using VM's for my "alternate" distros as it is easy to take
>> snap shots as you muck around and you can have multiple distros up and
>> running at the same time so you can compare things.  Also, when and if
>> you get tired of a particular distro you just delete the VM's.  Makes
>> redistribution of empty space a whole lot easier.
> Okay VM, hmmm, but I guess we lose some functionality in VM, however,
> this is just a newbie guess.....Rather, if Live CD is there, why not
> to play around a few and then see...?

Really, the only major functionality that you'll lose is the direct 
interaction between the O/S and the display hardware.  That is only a 
minor inconvenience since you can install all the major GUI's on your 
primary O/S and experiment with them there.

In another area you talked about Scientific Linux, and Fedora and openSUSE.

Scientific Linux is simply a variant Red Hat Enterprise Linux just as 
CentOS is.  It just packages, and installs by default, applications for 
the "scientific" community.  If you need those apps, you can simply add 
those in to your chosen O/S.  In other words, Scientific Linux is really 
nothing out of the ordinary or magical.

There are 2 primary differences between Fedora and openSUSE.  Fedora's 
default GUI is GNOME, while it is KDE in openSUSE.  The more important 
difference are the tools used in each for administration.

Also, a pointer....

In a mailing list, it best if you separately answer emails and not 
combine them into one as you did.  You included a response to Ian Malone 
in this.  It breaks the threading for his response.


-- 
Even if you do learn to speak correct English, whom are you going to 
speak it to? -- Clarence Darrow