Recommended Linux Distro?
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Jamie Hale wrote: There's some tiny part of me that blames Microsoft for the failure of my 2-year old drive Could you explain why you think so? :wtf: I see dumb people
Daniel Turini wrote: Could you explain why you think so? Nope. I can't. Just an odd feeling. Quite possibly completely unfounded. Regardless, I've been meaning to switch for a while now, and this seems like a perfect excuse. J "We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered." - Tom Stoppard - Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.
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Daniel Turini wrote: Could you explain why you think so? Nope. I can't. Just an odd feeling. Quite possibly completely unfounded. Regardless, I've been meaning to switch for a while now, and this seems like a perfect excuse. J "We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered." - Tom Stoppard - Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.
Godspeed :) Pankaj Without struggle, there is no progress
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Further to my last post[^] I will be moving my personal workstation to Linux. (There's some tiny part of me that blames Microsoft for the failure of my 2-year old drive.) Anyways, I started with Slackware however many thousands of years ago. Moved to Mandrake briefly, and since then I've been a RedHat user. My only 2 gripes were that KDevelop was slightly unstable (not RedHat's fault I know) and the RPM system sucked ass. Has that changed? I recall John or someone yelling about an RPM dependancy nightmare that sounded all too familiar. Was that RedHat? And have they fixed it with 8.0? Anyone know? J "We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered." - Tom Stoppard - Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.
Well, first, I wouldn't use Linux. Unix (FreeBSD plug) is the way, and I'll be saying that until the day I die. But, if you must stick with Linux then the distros I prefer are as follows... 1st choice: SuSE 2nd choice: Mandrake 3rd choice: RedHat (doesn't suck as much ass since 8.0) I'd stay away from Caldera simply because that company has done "sneaky" things with my email adress before and the distro sucks anyway. Jeremy Falcon Imputek
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Well, first, I wouldn't use Linux. Unix (FreeBSD plug) is the way, and I'll be saying that until the day I die. But, if you must stick with Linux then the distros I prefer are as follows... 1st choice: SuSE 2nd choice: Mandrake 3rd choice: RedHat (doesn't suck as much ass since 8.0) I'd stay away from Caldera simply because that company has done "sneaky" things with my email adress before and the distro sucks anyway. Jeremy Falcon Imputek
Excellent. Thanks for the reply. First off, I don't need to stick with Linux. I picked it because I am most familiar with it, but perhaps I'll throw a BSD partition on the drive. 1. Why do you use BSD? What benefits does it have over Linux? Will it run some of the mainstream applications nicely? KDevelop? OpenOffice? Opera? Will I have to purchase a license of QT to develop for it, or do the Gnome/KDE ports work nicely? 2. Why SuSE first? 3. Why Mandrake before RH? I coulda swore Mandrake was a RH derivative... I want a platform that isn't going to require an unusual amount of support by me. I don't mind tweaking and upgrading and fiddling... Also, I need something that will support regular office goings-ons. I need something that handles one of the office packages, preferably OpenOffice. Plus, and this is the big one, I need something that's not going to frighten my wife away. She's used to Windows at home and Macs at work. Thanks again for the input! J
"You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant."
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Further to my last post[^] I will be moving my personal workstation to Linux. (There's some tiny part of me that blames Microsoft for the failure of my 2-year old drive.) Anyways, I started with Slackware however many thousands of years ago. Moved to Mandrake briefly, and since then I've been a RedHat user. My only 2 gripes were that KDevelop was slightly unstable (not RedHat's fault I know) and the RPM system sucked ass. Has that changed? I recall John or someone yelling about an RPM dependancy nightmare that sounded all too familiar. Was that RedHat? And have they fixed it with 8.0? Anyone know? J "We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered." - Tom Stoppard - Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.
Jamie Hale wrote: I recall John or someone yelling about an RPM dependancy nightmare That would have been me :) I have since tried both Mandrake 9 and RH 8 and found both t obe quite nice distros. The mandrake installer is quite impressive, I was kind of surprised by how good it was. If you plan on using it alot, I would go with the RH8 distro becuase it comes with an X server that is all set up for anti aliased font support, and has both Qt and GTK built for supporting this as well, which is kind of nice (the aa support was the case when I tried it about 6 weeks ago, don't know what Mandrake 9.1 is like). If you plan on doing development work on it...guh, have fun (unless you're doing systems programming :) ) ¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! Real Mentats use only 100% pure, unfooled around with Sapho Juice(tm)!
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Jamie Hale wrote: I recall John or someone yelling about an RPM dependancy nightmare That would have been me :) I have since tried both Mandrake 9 and RH 8 and found both t obe quite nice distros. The mandrake installer is quite impressive, I was kind of surprised by how good it was. If you plan on using it alot, I would go with the RH8 distro becuase it comes with an X server that is all set up for anti aliased font support, and has both Qt and GTK built for supporting this as well, which is kind of nice (the aa support was the case when I tried it about 6 weeks ago, don't know what Mandrake 9.1 is like). If you plan on doing development work on it...guh, have fun (unless you're doing systems programming :) ) ¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! Real Mentats use only 100% pure, unfooled around with Sapho Juice(tm)!
Jim Crafton wrote: That would have been me :) I've been through the same. Drove me nuts. Jim Crafton wrote: If you plan on doing development work on it...guh, have fun (unless you're doing systems programming ) Why do you say this? Is KDevelop still crappy? J "We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered." - Tom Stoppard - Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.
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Further to my last post[^] I will be moving my personal workstation to Linux. (There's some tiny part of me that blames Microsoft for the failure of my 2-year old drive.) Anyways, I started with Slackware however many thousands of years ago. Moved to Mandrake briefly, and since then I've been a RedHat user. My only 2 gripes were that KDevelop was slightly unstable (not RedHat's fault I know) and the RPM system sucked ass. Has that changed? I recall John or someone yelling about an RPM dependancy nightmare that sounded all too familiar. Was that RedHat? And have they fixed it with 8.0? Anyone know? J "We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered." - Tom Stoppard - Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.
If you're obsessed with security, Debian is the way to go... In most other cases, I would stick to RedHad (even though rpm dependencies tend to lead to a certain amount of annoyance, I must admit)
Cheers,
Marc:beer: Click to see my *real* signature :beer:
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Further to my last post[^] I will be moving my personal workstation to Linux. (There's some tiny part of me that blames Microsoft for the failure of my 2-year old drive.) Anyways, I started with Slackware however many thousands of years ago. Moved to Mandrake briefly, and since then I've been a RedHat user. My only 2 gripes were that KDevelop was slightly unstable (not RedHat's fault I know) and the RPM system sucked ass. Has that changed? I recall John or someone yelling about an RPM dependancy nightmare that sounded all too familiar. Was that RedHat? And have they fixed it with 8.0? Anyone know? J "We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered." - Tom Stoppard - Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.
Let me add my support for FreeBSD. I love it, and have been running my server on it for years. It has always seemed very logical and easy to figure out, without the out-of-date-before-its-published-HOWTO-of-the-week that you get with Linux. However, if you're going to use Linux, these are my suggestions: Debian - not the easiest distro to start with, but the easiest to maintain. it's "apt" package management system is a breeze. SuSE - This is a well thought out distro, with lots of attention paid to minor details. Easy to install, and pretty good to maintain. It uses RPM's (nothing's perfect) but it has a pretty good tool (YaST) to manage them. gentoo - this is a real hard core distro, akin to building a computer from parts (or perhaps like building a "kit" :) However, it's very satisfying to get working and has an excellent package system known as "portage" which is based on the BSD ports system. This is what's called a "source based distro" because you compile everything. Very few binaries. Very cutting edge. I dislike Mandrake, mainly because they have very poor quality control. It's flashy, but it frequently breaks. Red Hat is "the standard" but as such, they are a lot more conservative, and the RPM management still sucks. They have some nice tools to manage the "official" packages, but once you veer outside that you're up to your neck. I don't know much about Slackware, though I understand it's configuration files and layout is similar to BSD's. There are a bunch of others, such as Lindows, Lycoris, Xandros, etc.. which are targeted at Windows users, but I have never used them, and they seem to be a bit short on the support side of things. -- Where are we going? And why am I in this handbasket?
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Let me add my support for FreeBSD. I love it, and have been running my server on it for years. It has always seemed very logical and easy to figure out, without the out-of-date-before-its-published-HOWTO-of-the-week that you get with Linux. However, if you're going to use Linux, these are my suggestions: Debian - not the easiest distro to start with, but the easiest to maintain. it's "apt" package management system is a breeze. SuSE - This is a well thought out distro, with lots of attention paid to minor details. Easy to install, and pretty good to maintain. It uses RPM's (nothing's perfect) but it has a pretty good tool (YaST) to manage them. gentoo - this is a real hard core distro, akin to building a computer from parts (or perhaps like building a "kit" :) However, it's very satisfying to get working and has an excellent package system known as "portage" which is based on the BSD ports system. This is what's called a "source based distro" because you compile everything. Very few binaries. Very cutting edge. I dislike Mandrake, mainly because they have very poor quality control. It's flashy, but it frequently breaks. Red Hat is "the standard" but as such, they are a lot more conservative, and the RPM management still sucks. They have some nice tools to manage the "official" packages, but once you veer outside that you're up to your neck. I don't know much about Slackware, though I understand it's configuration files and layout is similar to BSD's. There are a bunch of others, such as Lindows, Lycoris, Xandros, etc.. which are targeted at Windows users, but I have never used them, and they seem to be a bit short on the support side of things. -- Where are we going? And why am I in this handbasket?
I'm starting to wonder if I should be persuing BSD instead. I'm definitely open to the possibility. At present I'm in the midst of downloading RH8 in the hopes that it will nicely detect my GeForce4 - 7.2 did not. :( Do you think that I might have to tweak the hell out of the install to make FreeBSD notice my video card? J
"You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant."
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I'm starting to wonder if I should be persuing BSD instead. I'm definitely open to the possibility. At present I'm in the midst of downloading RH8 in the hopes that it will nicely detect my GeForce4 - 7.2 did not. :( Do you think that I might have to tweak the hell out of the install to make FreeBSD notice my video card? J
"You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant."
Hmm.. GeForce... One thing you're going to have to get used to in the land of Open Source software is that not all hardware will be supported. This is a simple fact of life, some IHVs refuse to release specs and refuse to write drivers. The GeForce in particular has been problematic because nVidia refuses to release specs on their hardware. They do provide a driver, but it's binary only which can mess with things. nVidia has recently released a FreeBSD driver though, you can find it here: http://www.nvidia.com/view.asp?IO=freebsd_1.0-3203[^] Your life will be easier with Open Source OS's if you stick to hardware which is Open Source friendly. -- Where are we going? And why am I in this handbasket?