Question about new install ...

[Nefarious]

I'm going to be installing linux fresh on one of my spare machines to kinda learn it and all .. i'm a newbie .. anyway, the distros i have a rh 7.1 and mandrake 8. i've heard some good and bad things about red hat, and nothing bad about mandrake. i've installed them both before and felt like mandrake gives you a little more freedom during the installation as to what gets installed.

now for the actual question. in order to learn this as best i can, should i do an install with NO additional options and just compile everything from scratch? i know with red hat you have to choose one of the install methods or custom, which last time i went through that it meant you had to go thru all the packages and decide what you want. that's a bit too much freedom for me at this point. what's the best way to learn? with a barebones install?

sorry this was so long and probably doensn't make any sense now :(

thanks for any replies from anybody that can make sense of this.

[Tfortysix]

Mandrake 8.0 is easier, though they are both easy! I would go ahead and choose "expert" install with drake, go with Reiser fs in the partition type options, and make sure "individual package selection" is a yellow star when you get to that. Don't worry too much about the options like "Gnome Desktop, KDE Desktop, CD Burning Software, etc.." . When you highlight an app, it will tell you what it does, takes some time, but you'll get what you want and you really can't screw it up. When you get it installed, get the sowtware manager up, and point the install source at a cooker site, you can get anything you want there. RH 7.1 is good, too, but the software manager pointed at cooker is better than what RH has to offer.

[compunuts]

I'd say if you have disk space, why not install it all and see which you like best? If you hadn't install anything, how do you know you will like it or not. I've never seen someone with only one install and learned enough Linux. :D

Don't ask me how many times I've reinstalled.... over the year... :eek:

[X_console]

I don't think you should do a barebones install if you're a newbie. First, you're not entirely sure what packages are important. Second, you might be missing out on some good things. I suggest doing a full install and playing around with it. Once you're comfortable with how Linux works and such, you can reinstall with a barebones system. I recommend going with Slackware or Debian for this since it gives you the most freedom of what you want to install.

[Nefarious]

thanks for the replies all.

i probably should have been more specific in what i was trying to do instead of babbling so much. i currently am hosting a site on windows 2000 server with asp and mssql. i'm trying to replace that box with a linux box. so basically i want apache with all the _good_ plugins and ftp. i'm not sure where the packaged versions of these installs them, but they never seem to be in the same place as all the howtos suggest. letting the install install those things takes away a good portion of my customizability in respect to those applications, correct? or can you make it work with the default locations?