Using Which Version of Linux

[Mike Meyer]

blahman (blah at blah.blah) writes:
> ok, i m going to use Linux for my Python Programs, mainly because i 
> need to see what will these fork() and exec() do. So, can anyone tell 
> me which flavour of linux i should use, some say that Debian is more 
> programmer friendly, or shold i use fedora, or Solaris. Because these 
> three are the only ones i know of that are popular and free.

You seem a bit confused. Solaris isn't a Linux distribution, it's
(System V) Unix. Linux isn't Unix - it's a Unix look-like. *BSD is
Unix, but they can't call it that for licensing reasons.

"Programmer-friendly" is pretty vague. Gentoo is the only Linux distro
I've run into (which excludes a *lot* of Unix distros) that I'd
consider programmer friendly, because it doesn't split packages up
into "user stuff" and "developer stuff". That means you have to
install two packages instead of one if you want to build things
against that software. On the other hand, it uses it's own "package"
manager - emerge - so you can't take advantage of rpms/debs from other
systems (or you couldn't last time I looked into it). It also installs
the least amount of "bundled" software, which I consider a programmer
friendly behavior.

Personally, I run FreeBSD - and I like gentoo because it has a lot in
common with a BSD distribution. FreeBSD is the most popular of the
BSDs. BSDs differ from Linuxen in that a BSD distribution is an
integrated whole - the kernel and userland are maintained by the same
group, in the same repository. So the number of BSD kernels to choose
from is much greater than the number of Linux kernels, but the number
of BSD distributions is much fewer.

       <mike
-- 
Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org>			http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/
Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information.