[sf-lug] (forw) [buug] for an aspiring young person interested ininformation security and LINUX ...

[david at sterryit.com]

That's a great list from buug.

I have to say that after trying(mainly installing and playing with) debian, slackware, freebsd, a few versions of rehat, fedora core 3 and 4, and a couple of versions of ubuntu, ubuntu takes the cake as the distro to start with. Dapper Drake 6.06 LTS, their latest is really quite slick. I dl'd the iso a couple days ago and burnt 5 copies of it. I setup one for my father, got my cousin started by running the live cd on a severely infected  windows machine and upgraded my previous ubuntu install on my laptop.  The fact that there's a little Install icon glaring at livecd users is good from my pov as someone who wants linux to mature for regular non-geeks.

What I love about ubuntu is that it is pretty straightforward to install, has a pretty solid set of apps that you can work with and with the xirc client, it's very easy to connect to the great #ubuntu channel on the freenode irc system. They've helped me with many a question and I highly recommend anyone to ask a question or two over there. The realtime help availabe there has been a godsend. Other channels like #apache and #wordpress are good too if you're trying to hack away some new special sauce. Now if I can just get this belkin mimo wifi adapter to work with ndiswrapper!

-Dave Sterry