forgottenwizard wrote:
> The reason I mainly suggested Gentoo, btw, is I though LFS would be a
> bit much for someone new to Linux. I've always seen Gentoo as a sort of
> 'LFS for the lazy'.
>
Yeah, but even that is too much for most people. We forget that
sometimes =). I've had a lot of fun learning difficult things by just
not offering myself any alternative (Vim, dvorak, Slickware, Hebrew),
but most people don't want to immerse themselves in something new and
confusing and flounder until it startes to make sense.

Anyway, I think that if the poster wants to use Linux primarily as a
vehicle for Ruby/Rails programming, he might not be the type to enjoy
(and spend time) learning all its internals.

Dan

Dan Zwell wrote the following on 14.09.2007 12:21 :
> forgottenwizard wrote:
>> The reason I mainly suggested Gentoo, btw, is I though LFS would be a
>> bit much for someone new to Linux. I've always seen Gentoo as a sort of
>> 'LFS for the lazy'.
>>
> Yeah, but even that is too much for most people. We forget that
> sometimes =). I've had a lot of fun learning difficult things by just
> not offering myself any alternative (Vim, dvorak, Slickware, Hebrew),
> but most people don't want to immerse themselves in something new and
> confusing and flounder until it startes to make sense.
>
> Anyway, I think that if the poster wants to use Linux primarily as a
> vehicle for Ruby/Rails programming, he might not be the type to enjoy
> (and spend time) learning all its internals.
>

There's one aspect of the OS choice that I don't think was mentionned in
this thread.

If you are in the position of being both developper and sysadmin, you'd
better start learning the technical details. Here Gentoo or *BSD are far
better than "user-friendly" Linux distributions (at least with Gentoo
you can't use it witout learning how to manage partitions/LVM volumes,
how grub is installed, how daemons are started, stopped and configured,
what maintenance tasks should be done and automated and so can avoid
shooting yourself in the foot and know what to do in disaster recovery
situations).
Even in a company where there are both dedicated sysadmins and
developpers, the developpers should at least test their software
(installation and run) on systems similar to the production which
usually means the ones the sysadmins know the best. No matter how good
the application code is, if sysadmins can't make it run properly, it's
utterly useless.

Even if the question was "What Linux distribution to choose for learning
Ruby and Ruby on Rails", if the ultimate goal is to put a Rails
application in production, one should think about system administration...

Lionel.

On 19:37 Fri 14 Sep , Lionel Bouton wrote:
> Dan Zwell wrote the following on 14.09.2007 12:21 :
> > forgottenwizard wrote:
> >> The reason I mainly suggested Gentoo, btw, is I though LFS would be a
> >> bit much for someone new to Linux. I've always seen Gentoo as a sort of
> >> 'LFS for the lazy'.
> >>
> > Yeah, but even that is too much for most people. We forget that
> > sometimes =). I've had a lot of fun learning difficult things by just
> > not offering myself any alternative (Vim, dvorak, Slickware, Hebrew),
> > but most people don't want to immerse themselves in something new and
> > confusing and flounder until it startes to make sense.
> >
> > Anyway, I think that if the poster wants to use Linux primarily as a
> > vehicle for Ruby/Rails programming, he might not be the type to enjoy
> > (and spend time) learning all its internals.
> >

He could also just grab a Knoppix LiveCD to play with, if he wants to
try to use Linux for ruby deving (if it actually HAS ruby installed).

There is also a distro out there that uses Ruby for most everything it
can, although I forgot the name.

Would be nice to have some feedback from the OP on this, so we have a
better idea on what we're looking for.


> There's one aspect of the OS choice that I don't think was mentionned in
> this thread.
>
> If you are in the position of being both developper and sysadmin, you'd
> better start learning the technical details. Here Gentoo or *BSD are far
> better than "user-friendly" Linux distributions (at least with Gentoo
> you can't use it witout learning how to manage partitions/LVM volumes,
> how grub is installed, how daemons are started, stopped and configured,
> what maintenance tasks should be done and automated and so can avoid
> shooting yourself in the foot and know what to do in disaster recovery
> situations).
> Even in a company where there are both dedicated sysadmins and
> developpers, the developpers should at least test their software
> (installation and run) on systems similar to the production which
> usually means the ones the sysadmins know the best. No matter how good
> the application code is, if sysadmins can't make it run properly, it's
> utterly useless.
>
> Even if the question was "What Linux distribution to choose for learning
> Ruby and Ruby on Rails", if the ultimate goal is to put a Rails
> application in production, one should think about system administration...
>
> Lionel.
>
>

Good point, although how far into the internals you want to go will make
a diffrence on choice.