[svlug] Good linux distro for learning programming

[Don Marti]

begin  James Todd quotation of Sat, Oct 30, 2004 at 01:51:16AM -0700:

> No way. Not even. Java excellent/consistent/etc on several distro's I
> have worked with (JDS, SuSE, Debian, RH, ManDrake) and on friend's
> systems (GenToo) runnin various h/w platforms including x86, amd, sparc,
> apple, zaurus, phones, etc.

Sun's Java is under a license that means it can't be
included as an official part of Debian, but Java can
be made to work on many distributions.

  http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-java-faq/

Asking Java questions in a forum that's not dedicated
to Java is guaranteed to bring out comments from
people who don't like Java.

Some people think that Java is a bad language, Sun's
libraries for Java are bad, the licensing terms for
Java are unacceptable, or that any language that so
many big dumb companies have gone ga-ga over must
have something wrong with it.

  http://www.paulgraham.com/javacover.html

A promising direction is compiling Java like C.
This can make it possible to deploy Free Software
applications written in Java on all-Free systems.

  http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=4860
  http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=7413

Anyway, the original question was about picking
a distribution.

That really depends on two factors: what, if any,
proprietary software you want to run and where you
plan to get support.  Checklist items you should
look for are an easy package management and update
tool (pretty much everyone has them now) and a good
security mailing list.

How to Pick a Distribution:

  http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=4619

-- 
Don Marti
http://zgp.org/~dmarti/
dmarti at zgp.org                       Keep your mangement off my digital rights.