UNIX for Beginners Questions & Answers

The operating system is a large set of programs that runs (supervises) the system and runs other system and user programs. The operating system comprises not only the memory resident kernel but also a multitude of run-time libraries, internal commands and external commands (the kind you see in /bin for example) which all need to be compatible and interact with each other. All these are written in human readable code (in C, C++, Assembler, et al) and can comprise several hundred thousand lines of code. Over several hours compilers convert all this human readable code into machine language creating a kernel that can be booted to control all the hardware. The compiled code can then be formatted into DVD media for installation purposes.

That's why the code is so large and compiling it takes a long time.

Damn Tapatalk app...anyway, Xubuntu less of a headache because it comes with all kinds of goodies that don't use a lot of RAM. It's file manager, Thunar, is also really good. But in all honesty, you really can't call Xubuntu or any Linux system a different operating system since they are all GNU/Linux. It's the package managers that are different. And since most Linux systems are derivatives of others, the kernels are all the same except for architecture (32 or 64) and version number (age of distro).

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bakunin

Just want to say thank you guys for all your responses, and sorry about the large image.
I'm thinking I'm going to try Gentoo source code, because it seems to have a lot of support from other users online for amd64 processors.
If that takes a while though (which it probably will) for me to get things up and running, I've got an installer to put xubuntu64 on it in the meantime. I'll let everyone know how it goes.

Gentoo was the first distribution I actually learned a lot from instead of running the installer, clicking 'next', and spinning my wheels until I screwed something up to the point I had to reinstall. It's difficult, but can be rewarding.

It's also the first distribution which worked with amd64, so far as I can tell. I jumped into the 64-bit revolution with an opteron way back when, and though every distro was rushing out 64-bit boot disks as fast as they could, Gentoo's was the only one which actually booted.

I would distill everything posted so far to mean: get a 64 bit computer with at least 16GB of RAM, RAM is cheap, install software to allow you to run virtual servers, I use virtualbox, create a vm and install the Linux distro of your choice, Centos is a good choice for someone who wants this to translate into a job, and do whatever you are trying to do. You can probably backup to VM's when you are about to try something that might fubar your VM. Then you can recover. Having a large amount of disk space won't hurt. If you really want to compile your own Linux, then you might want to take a look at Arch Linux.

Hmmm...64 bit is a must these days in Linux because it won't be long before 32 bit is no longer supported. As far as RAM goes, 16 gigs is a LOT for the average Linux user. On a day when I'm doing a bunch of things at once (all workspaces full; XFCE), I've never touched 3GB, ever. Centos is a good choice if you want to run a server. As far as just Linux in general, I've always been a huge fan of the XFCE desktop. So, Centos with XFCE might be a really good option for you at the moment and then use Virtual Box to explore other Linux distros and provide even more options that Centos might not even have. You can always install Wine if you need to run a simple Windows application, but having Virtual Box with Windows would be even better. I'd say just install it on another partition, but VB would be easier and safer. Plus, if you have an unregistered copy, you can keep reloading a backup of it. 😜


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