Recommendations please

[Alex Martelli]

<searcher7 at my-deja.com> wrote in message news:8njla4$2ds$1 at nnrp1.deja.com...
> Nope. I'm a complete newbie.(And really don't understand what you
> said). I've never used or seen anything outside of Windows. I mentioned
> Freebsd because it is supposed to be the most stable operating system.
> (Which is very important for a project I'll be working on).

I really don't know how BeOs, Linux variants, BSD variants etc stack up
in terms of stability.

In any case, do consider that for some operating systems (and I think
BSD and BeOs are in that group) most add-ons you want you'll have
to build from sources.  Not rocket science, but maybe not the easiest
thing in the world for a newbie.  Unless you have somebody handy,
who knows the OS in question and is ready to help you with the
builds, you might be happier with a system for which it's easier to
find pre-built binaries, such as Solaris or Linux.  If that is your
choice, then the 'stability' problem can probably be solved by
choosing a NOT-the-latest version, that's been frozen for a long
time except for fixes; you may want to ask about details on the
newsgroups devoted to the specific OS's.

Python, AFAIK, is neither easier nor harder to build from sources
than most free packages -- well, maybe a tad bit easier.  Anyway,
the pre-built binaries of 1.5.2 are available (besides systems such
as Windows, OS2, Mac, etc) for Debian Linux, BeOS, QNX; for
most other systems, you build it from sources.


Alex