The reason I wanted to try Linux in the first place was that I was doing some websites and needed to mess around with cgi scripts in perl. I thought since the servers run linux, it would make sense to emulate that environment at home. The first thing I tried was Slackware, I think v3. Well that was a little much, I had a book that I borrowed from a friend but it was quite involved and I didn’t really know what I was doing. I tried a couple versions of Red Hat in the years following that but there was no easy way for me to find out what exactly I needed to do to get an up and running install of apache and perl. I didn’t try looking on the net because I didn’t want to spend that much time on it. I also got the impression that without a thick book on Red Hat, I was totally lost. (more…)