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

[Linux Tyro]

On Fri, Nov 25, 2011 at 3:33 AM, Ed Greshko <Ed.Greshko at greshko.com> wrote:

> Where in India do you live?  Have you had any luck in finding a LUG near
> you as was suggested a while back?  I as that since you've said you are
> a "beginner", you have chosen a pseudonym to reflect that, and it just
> seemed that you'd benefit from that type of one-on-one environment.

I live in the Northern part of India. Well out of the job getting time
for LUG is typical still I would have to find the one to know the
geeky ways around the computers, that's of much enhanced curiosity.

> 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?

> 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.

> Well, as a beginner, aren't you concerned that you'll be dividing up
> your time too much so that you'll not become proficient in one area and
> that you'll confuse the way things are done among the distros?

Good suggestion but as a beginner I just wanted to play with the
distros for which I am downloading the LIVE CDs too and yes you are
correct, I should stick with Fedora so that I can get the grip of one
that I am using, a better way, I agree.

> I'm sure others will be better at guiding you to a working configuration
> that you think you want.

Oh, okay.

> 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...?

On Fri, Nov 25, 2011 at 6:27 AM, Ian Malone <ibmalone at gmail.com> wrote:

> I agree with this, it doesn't matter /too/ much which distribution
> Linux Tyro actually goes with if you want to get general experience in
> using Linux.

Yeah, going with both - Fedora and openSUSE.

> Having lots of different distributions installed you'll
> find that you:
> 1. End up doing lots of admin tasks on all of them. On this list we
> tend to deal with lots of Fedora issues (e.g. not liking Gnome3, use
> XFCE instead, problems with SELinux), but other distros will have
> their own problems. With five distros you could potentially end up
> doing five times as much of this annoying problem solving stuff. That
> might be exactly the experience you're looking for or it might get in
> the way of doing more interesting stuff. However...

That's just a holiday play to see the geeky way, if it works out or
not! However, I am sure that I would come back to the end with three
options - Scientific Linux (and that's why Fermi Lab, CERN are using
it!!), and Fedora and openSUSE

> 2. You'll probably end up using one over the others.

I agree this fact.

> I had to break into the windows install on my laptop last month because it turned out
> I hadn't actually booted it into windows for two years and had
> forgotten the password.

:), Windows people don't prefer now a days, I guess so.... less
secured, without a doubt!

> Picking one and going with VMs for the others as Ed Greshko suggests
> is probably a good compromise,

But I know it is for sure a compromise only!

> unless you really want to investigate a
> good way of getting so many systems to boot together happily.

Yeah sure.

Thanks.