Vector: September 2009 Archives

A comment in one of my "backup" blogs (i.e. little used and just sitting there ... waiting) alerted me to a new blog, Tropic of Vector, which chronicles one guy's effort to find the right operating system for a Pentium III-era laptop. After trying everything from Xubuntu down to Puppy and Damn Small Linux, he settled on Vector Linux Light, which aims to make the already resource-sparing Vector Linux run even better with slower CPUs and smaller memory footprints.
And while scanning the Vector Linux site, I found a great reference for all the VL systems, The Vector Linux Cookbook of Common Tasks.
This is just the sort of thing that users new and old can really use when wading into a new Linux distribution (or any Linux distribution) for the first time.
Many but not all distributions and projects have similar wikis/handbooks, and they are a great resource. I've seen great "handbook" type docs for ZenWalk, Slackware and of course the many BSD projects.
And for those of you running Ubuntu or its variants, there's a lot there, too. I also recommend that new Ubuntu users get an actual printed book (my favorites are by Keir Thomas and Rickford Grant).
Man pages are great (OK, often they're lousy, especially in Linux when compared to a project such as OpenBSD that actually cares about man-page quality), but most people Google for info they need, and to go along with Web searches, having a definable and huge reference in one place can be a big help.





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