I have always had a vivid interest in computers but had not found an outlet for that interest until a fellow employee at a mom and pop electronics store turned me on to hacking. He advised me to first learn the ins and outs of windows as a kind of booster to see if I was really up to devoting time and money to learning everything I could. I've been going at windows for about twenty hours a week for the last three months. He found that to be an adequate level of devotion to recommend linux knoppix std so I could start getting serious about hacking. That is where my question comes in.I have been having trouble getting my hands on a distribution of linux. I am fully aware of the millions of mirrors out there but do not have the time or level of hardware to download one.I will probably end up just having a distribution shipped to me using good old fashioned box and postage stamp but would like input from people with a greater understanding of this before I make any decisions.

If you want a serious Linux Distribution, get slackware shipped to you, http://www.slackware.com/

Or if you're a complete newb and want to get used to it with an easy interface, there is always Linspire (formerly Lindows) http://www.linspire.com/

CentOS is becoming really popular as a server OS. It's Red Hat Enterprise, but they take out all the RH branding, so it's completely free. Exact same OS, just without the RH label anywhere.

Debian is a good beginner distro. The package management is solid and easy to use. Gentoo is another distro that has good package management, and I think a lot of the people around here like this more than Debian.

If you want to be a beast, use FreeBSD .

Gentoo is the way to go but it probably has the highest learning curve along with any of the BSDs. But gentoo and debian require the most bandwidth because they are mostly net installs(its really pointless to use these distrobutions if you arent going to take advantage of thier great package management systems that allow you to download updates/additional software with some simple commands.)

If you dont have the hardware/connection to download a linux distro I would recomend going to your library they probably have some old linux computer book there that comes with an old distro on CD that you can install and experiment with.

Slackware would be a good one to start with.

We're going CentOS on our new servers that we're rolling out in California

I put gentoo on all my servers at my work. Debian on all cutomers servers because it uses less bandwidth and is less time consuming. All though we still have customers out there that are running old redhat 6, 7 ,8 boxes... That don't need/want an upgrade. God I hate redhat.

Well our "have to" software Ensim (which runs prettymuch everything) requires a RH varient...

No shit, you guys use Ensim? I was just looking at that today. This ISP who used to do some hosting for us just moved thier customers a new system with ensim. But ill be moving all of our customers to our own hosting and was looking at ensim to administrate it. Do you like it?

Man, I f'in love ensim; it it awesome... The security levels are sweet, there is Medium for someoen who needs to use a full "real" path to their account (which is rare) and then there is "high" which is for "virtual" directories; basically any site that has a virtual directory can never see anything beneath it...

They have some virtual tours at ensim.com and you can rent a cheap license (or buy one cheaper) at HostingYourWebSite.net

IMO, Ensim kicks the shit out of Plesk, CPanel, etc... It's also a hell of a lot easier to maintain/add users (and has a full command line interface so you're not constricted to a GUI).

Ensim blows.

FreeBSD + csh = pwnx0rz420. holla

I prefer Ensim over ANY control panel, plus it's cheaper than most...

The downside to using any control panel is that they generally tie deeply into your system so removal is a total bitch

perg doesnt even know what ensim is....and really it has nothing to do with your OS

A control panel is more server maintenance such as easily adding/removing sites or various other portions of your sites (such as we can easily manage email addresses or mailing lists and even spam filters within ensim)).

Except I do, because I've had some of my sites hosted on machines that had Ensim, I've had Ensim on one of my own servers, and have helped install Tomcat on a number of servers that use Ensim.

I stand by my comment that Ensim blows.

And I stand by my statement that if a user doesn't even know what a CLI is that a GUI is the best option for them; not to mention in Ensim it's fairly all straight forward and once a password is set a password is set (unlike Plesk and CPanel where you have to set it in 9 differant places for differant services).