Hi guys

I'm looking for a pointer in the right direction. ish!

About 18months ago I left my job in Academia and have since had very little contact with Linux.
I have am a RHCT in RHEL3, but went to work for a Microsoft based company (miss sold the job abit there really!)

Still I'm now into another job where they are considering porting some java based hardware control apps from Windows to Linux. I want to be ready for the change so want to start dabbling in Linux again before this.


Soooo where should I start.... whats the best distribution for me to go back to: CentOS or Fedora or Something Debian based.

I know people have preferences but I just want something that I can jump back into without any issue.
Last distributions I used where Fedora 3 and some old NIS stuff on RedHat 7.3 that I could never get working on anything else!

Your ideas please.
Also can anyone point me in the direction of a cheep site for buying CDs of Linux as I don't want to disrupt the misses from playing computer games!

If you are certfied then I'd start with CentOS. It's is RHEL without the Red Hat logos.

CentOS 4.3 is on its way down now (I hope)
CentOS-4.3-i386-bin1to4.torrent <-- Better be the right torrent to be downloading!!

So is there anything really different that I will come across in a 18 month gap?

You might want to look here or at other items on RedHat's site.

http://www.redhat.com/f/pdf/rhel4/EL4OverviewWP.pdf

CentOS is just a whitewashed version of RHEL.

I don't think you'll find anything all that different. RedHat still considers your cert active and plenty of places run RHEL3

Thanks

I now have it downloaded, all I need to do is get my old laptop back and Ill be giving CentOS a try!

After Centos you'll probably want to look at Fedora. I'm a big fan of Suse myself as I think Yast is the ultimate in ease of use. But I'd get 10.0 and avoid 10.1. It has had lots of bugs and doesn't IMO appear to be a stable distro.