Good question, with all the different flavors of linux out there these
days it can be tough deciding on what to use. I suggest starting at
distrowatch:
http://distrowatch.com
There they have a lot of information on a number of different distros.
I espically recommend looking at distro comparison table:
http://distrowatch.colug.net/top.php?1
The major distros that you will probably want to concentrate on are
the following:
Red Hat, Mandrake, Debian, SuSE, and maybe Slackware... In fact many
people simply forget everything except RedHat and Debian, because most
other distros simply use one of those as a base and then just change
some of the packages, and the installer. Looking at the package
management system usually tells you what your distro is based on. That
is distros that use RPM package management are based on RedHat,
distros that use DEB are based on Debian. (Note: SRC, and TGZ
basically means no "real" package management, those distros just use
regular old compression tools for package management. Which means you
don't really get and dependancy checking, or a fancy UI, etc...)
But seeing as how this is your first Linux install, what I would
recommend is RedHat.
The install is pretty easy, and they have a pretty GUI to guide you
through the whole thing. HylaFAX is not shipped w/ RedHat8.0 but
HylaFAX does have an RPM that you could easily install in a RedHat
system. Also RedHat (as with almost all distros) comes with all the
networking tools you really need to setup a home network (although
setting up such a network is not always easy, there is lots of
documentation online that can help with any problems you run into, and
never forget: man pages are invalueable!).
As far as hebrew support goes: I am not sure if the RedHat install
process will support hebrew, but if I recall, there is a step in the
install process that will prompt you for your language of choice. This
will install fonts for languages (including hebrew) if you so desire.
I am not sure exactly how the language installation works (I only
speak one language :( but if the installer cannot set hebrew to the
default language then you can easily setup your applications to use
hebrew. The following "Howto" gives instuctions on how to get your
linux distro to use hebrew:
http://www.europe.redhat.com/documentation/HOWTO/Hebrew-HOWTO.php3
Note: Section 4 talks of setting up hebrew on X windows 3.1 (RH8.0
comes with X4.0) but after looking at the instructions it seems like
most everything is the same for X windows 4.0 (with the possible
exception of filenames and/or path names).
Anyhow as far as actaully getting the distro goes, the distro
comparison table has a link to the install images for each distro. You
can either use that link to download your distro and then follow the
directions to burn it to a CD-R. Or you can download most distros from
"Linux ISO" (Basically the same as downloading from comparison table):
http://www.linuxiso.org/
Or if you don't have a high speed internet connection and/or burner
you can goto your local computer geek store and buy a copy in a
shrinkwrap box for usually around $50. But I am guessing that you have
both the highspeed i-net and burner, so I would suggest just
downloading and burning and keeping the $50 unless you really
want/need support from the distro (Because thats what the fifty bucks
is really buying you: support).
Anyhow no matter what you do, or how you do it here are some tips from
me:
Personal recommendation 1: No matter which distro you choose, I have
found KDE to be a better window manager than Gnome (but EVERYONE has
their opinion on this, and I am sure that if this were not such a
professional site I would get flamed from here to kingdom come for
voicing mine... :) but I tell you this because RedHat suggests Gnome
as the default when you install, and I think you may be happier with
KDE. Just my 2cents.
Personal recommendation 2: For the boot loader, use lilo (rather than
grub) installed on your MBR (master boot record) (And don't bother
making a boot floppy, because the install CD can be used to boot the
system in a pinch.) Anyway, lilo is not as new and as fancy as grub.
But if you ever have a problem booting your system (which can happen)
I have found that lilo is much easier to use/configure than Grub. Grub
may be prettier, but when my system is down I prefer spending my time
fixing the problem, rather than spending 8 hours learning how to use
grub. Its totally up to you however.
Anyhow I hope this helps, if you have any other questions, concerns,
or problems please feel free to let me know, and I will try to help
you out however I can.
Thanks,
--jld |
