yet another linux post (updated. again.)

For those of you who were intrigued by my efforts to convince you to try Linux, I present the following links, which may be useful, intriguing, interesting, or some other adjective which implies that it's worth your time to check them out:

Choosing the Right Linux Distribution (via Linux.com)

In this beginner introduction, Jethro Carr presents helpful tips for choosing the right Linux distro for your needs. He provides details regarding: purposes of different flavors, package management, stability, and personal experiences with numerous versions.

This is really useful, and is a great starting point if you're serious about switching. I always tell people that the right one is the one that does what you want it to do, and this actually includes all operating systems, not just *nix ones. For example, if you're a hardcore gamer, you need Windows, even though there are ways to play games in Linux, for the average user, it's not worth the headache to make it work.

Learn Ubuntu Linux with freely available e-book

As you might expect from the title, the 931-page book covers everything you need to know about installing, configuring and using Ubuntu. It teaches you groups, graphics, gaming, spreadsheets, e-mail and much more . . . You'll need a password to unlock the pdf (Wil: What?) which is easy enough: [Deleted]

Updated: So apparently the "freely available e-book" was never intended to be free, a fact that eluded both Lifehacker and myself. Hey, people who think it's cool to pull this sort of bullshit, and rip off a publisher? Die in a fire. When you do asshole things like this, you set back the efforts of those of us who believe that making freely available e-books is a great way to market and build audience. Great work, shitcocks.

However, the book is available for purchase online.

Updated again: In comments, Stephen says:

For anyone wanting a book about Ubuntu, the Official Ubuntu Book is
licensed under a Creative Commons License, and a download is available here . This is easily viewable under Windows, to read in Linux you need to install the gnochm package.

If you like the e-book, they also have a print version available for a reasonably-priced purchase. I really like this idea: a 900+ page e-book isn't exactly practical for me really use, but offering it for free lets me see if it's going to be a useful addition to my library and print out the pages that I know I'm going to refer to while I wait for my dead tree copy to arrive. Related to this: has anyone made any serious efforts to do away with paper in the workplace? I get my Legion scripts as .pdfs now, and I rarely print them at home (they print them for us at the studio) but I'll still print out articles from the online versions of newspapers to read later or share with friends and family. When I edit my writing, I always have to print it out double-spaced so I can make notes and corrections, but my editor and I (who are separated by several states and two time zones) have begun using OpenOffice.org to make notes and changes on my upcoming book. It's sort of a CVS system for text that's very cool and useful, and saves us the time and expense of printing, shipping, and returning paper manuscripts. Oh, and writers? Skype is so awesome for working with an editor: you chat or type in one window, make changes on a document in your desktop and then just drop it into the box to send it back and forth. It's not quite a flying car, but it's still teh futar.

The Perfect Desktop - Part 3: Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy Eft (via technocrat)

With the release of Microsoft's new Windows operating system (Vista), more and more people are looking for alternatives to Windows for various reasons. This tutorial is the third in a series of articles where I will show people who are willing to switch to Linux how they can set up a Linux desktop (Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy Eft in this article) that fully replaces their Windows desktop, i.e. that has all software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that runs also on older hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge.

As always, I'm interested to hear the experiences WWdN readers are having with the great Linux experiment; previous Linux posts on my blog have turned into cool advocacy (not the ponytail kind, the helpful kind) and technical support discussions, so it's a cool resource to use, if you're interested, or intrigued, or some other adjective which implies that it's worth your time to check these threads out.