Linux, yea..that OS

Well, first of all, I be a Windows fan but was looking into Linux because I have toyed with it from time to time and it looks nice and, from what I hear, its much faster. I like to do PHP, HTML, CSS, and C++ development stuff..Was wondering (Since there is 100000 linux versions) if there is one tailored to development. Was wondering what would be a good Linux to start on? I don't care about the time to set it up, etc..I would rather have a good system over an "out of the box" one...

P.S. If this is the wrong section..Always came here for my problems/help on programming so I figured somebody here has to be able to help me on this, since its not as easy as picking up the latest OS version like Windows ;)

You could try this: http://www.zegeniestudios.net/ldc/

Personally I prefer Slackware but for a first stab at it I think Fedora is excellent.

Moved To Linux Development

For desktop Ubuntu

For development Fedora or CentOS for a more stable platform.

You can of course on all of the above opt to have PHP, MySQL and Apache installed out of the box. But if you want a more bespoke configuration / the latest versions and binaries with smaller foot prints, I would recommend downloading the source code and compiling the packages.

In the vast majority of cases this can be done in several statements:

Code:

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bash$ ./configure --with-custom-option1 --with-custom-option2 --with-custom-option3
bash$ make
bash$ make install

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Have fun. :)

Thanks both of you, seen CentOS around on a few things..So going to look into that first :)

I'd recommend Arch Linux. It comes bare bones, you have to set everything up yourself. This will get you a lot of experience with linux and it will also be highly optimized because you don't have anything you don't need. You can't be afraid of the command line for this though.

Gentoo is probably the most code-centric distro, because everything is installed and compiled from the bare source. It's not very noob friendly though or so I'm told.

Centos, Redhat and Fedora are basically the same distro but with different target audiences. Centos is pretty damn good for coding because you get everything Redhat has (it's literally identical to redhat but with all corporate branding removed), including "yum" which is a nice automated software updater/installer/remover.

Ubuntu is reasonably good for developing on these days, and it's gradually improving, although they do tend to mess with their software repos a lot which can get irritating. However updates and security fixes are VERY frequent (almost to the point of being annoyingly persistent - which is good from an admin's POV).

For coding in C and php, I'd recommend CentOS, followed by Ubuntu close behind. Ubuntu has better hardware support though. Depends what you need, really.

Quote:

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Since there is 100000 linux versions)....

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Linux is just linux, there aren't 100000 versions of it, there is just 1 linux kernel. There may be umpteen flavours, but again there are only 2 main groups to choose from. The RPM based ones and the Debian ones.

All other linux operating systems (however fancy the name) are based on one of these groups.

The Ubuntu family is I think very popular these days, an I use it myself to develop PHP based applications.

Mandriva is also a good operating system. It is usually used in KDE desktop, the KDE desktop looks and feels like Windows, so many first time users prefer to use KDE.

Both are equally popular and have good support.

Once you select the appropriate OS for yourself, you need to install Apache webserver, check on google for tutorials on how you can download and configure apache.

After this install and configure PHP to the computer. Once you have done all this you can start PHP development.