I like this idea of a Linux starter kit. I believe that it offers the user a real hand in getting into their Linux experience the right way in the first place.

Sams Publishing’s Linux Starter Kit bundles a SUSE Linux 10.1 DVD, a searchable SUSE reference manual in PDF, and a paperback Quick Start Guide together in one $40 package. Here is a look inside.

Since SUSE 10.1 has already been reviewed extensively, and is not the product of Sams’ efforts, I will dispense with reviewing directly. It is worth examining Sams’ choice of distributions, however. SUSE is a good choice because — despite being historically a KDE distro — since its acquisition by Novell, it has elevated GNOME desktops to more-or-less equal status. On initial installation, you must choose one or the other, but both are available on the installation media. The same could not be said of Ubuntu, for example, which focuses its GNOME and KDE attention on essentially two separate-but-equal distros, standard Ubuntu and Kubuntu. For a Linux vet, it’s not a major issue, but imposing such a choice on users new enough to want a “starter kit” would be asking for trouble.

Likewise, including a DVD-based installer is a win not just for Sams’ production costs, but for new-user-friendliness. I still suffer from intermittent nightmares about having to swap in and swap out installation diskettes on the primitive Macs of my childhood — and more recently of doing the same with Red Hat CDs.

And of course, despite the controversy such a decision inevitably brings, a “starter kit” absolutely must supply a distro that can pre-install commercial components like closed-source video drivers and proprietary media codecs. It may be an evil to the eyes of some, but a brand-new free software user needs such a hand up to escape the non-free software world…. Source: NewsForge