Different Linux Distributions

[vitualis]

Every now and then, I try out another Linux distribution and play with it for a while. As yet, I have not found one that can take over from my Windows system in terms of even the core functionalities, though they are getting better.

Yesterday, I tried out Lindows 4.0 on a CD (came with APC) and I have to say it looked quite slick -- though it seemed like you lost all the security benefits of Linux with it. Since the last (other) version Linux I used was Mandrake 8.2 I wanted to get some opinions on what people thought of the various distros of Linux. What is good about a particular distro, what is bad...



Regards.

[Conquest10]

The only one I've tried was Mandrake 8.1 I believe it was. I had no idea what I was doing. I couldn't even get my mouse to work. It worked during installation but as soon as it booted up, no mouse. I couldn't even connect to the internet. I got rid of it and quickly returned to my beloved Windows.

[The village idiot]

Every once in a while I'll try something from freeBSD, but lately I can't even get the newest release (v 5.x) to run on my Via based systems

Since Apple is using it, you now get all kinds of good things like firewire support and USB2 support. But I must admit that I haven't really spent enough time trying to make it work!

http://www.freeBSD.org to get the iso's.

And v 5.x is 64 bit

[thayne]

Every once in a while I'll try something from freeBSD, but lately I can't even get the newest release (v 5.x) to run on my Via based systems

Since Apple is using it, you now get all kinds of good things like firewire support and USB2 support. But I must admit that I haven't really spent enough time trying to make it work!

http://www.freeBSD.org to get the iso's.

And v 5.x is 64 bit

No you won't. Apple's OSX is based on FreeBSD, but isn't freeBSD and they are doing no development for it (freeBSD that is).

I gave up on Linux/Unix for a desktop OS. I only use it for servers now. I prefer Slackware (Linux) or FreeBSD (Unix). Both are rock solid and fast....

[The village idiot]

Every once in a while I'll try something from freeBSD, but lately I can't even get the newest release (v 5.x) to run on my Via based systems

Since Apple is using it, you now get all kinds of good things like firewire support and USB2 support. But I must admit that I haven't really spent enough time trying to make it work!

http://www.freeBSD.org to get the iso's.

And v 5.x is 64 bit

No you won't. Apple's OSX is based on FreeBSD, but isn't freeBSD and they are doing no development for it (freeBSD that is).

I gave up on Linux for a desktop OS. I only use it for servers now. I prefer Slackware (Linux) or FreeBSD (Unix). Both are rock solid and fast....

Funny they claim that they are contributing to the community. It is an open source base. Only the Aqua and Cocoa layers are closed source. But maybe you are correct.

[thayne]

They contribute to Darwin, which is Unix and it's based on FreeBSD, but it's not FreeBSD. Does that make sense? Dawin is like Apples Unix distro, even though it's not called a distro. They took a lot from FreeBSD, changed it all around added some stuff, deleted some stuff and made Darwin.

I once downloaded the PC version of Darwin, but it wouldn't install. Even if it would have there is no gui for it. You might be able to make KDE run on it, but I gave up on it. FreeBSD is much better on the PC platform than Darwin.

Some of their utilities might compile on FreeBSD, but not mouse drivers and stuff, thats all part of Aqua and only runs on a Mac.

[The village idiot]

I too tried Darwin for PC, but it would not work on my Via chipsets. I'm even having a problem with freeBSD 5.0 on one Via machine, so I'm still not using any *nix OS. Going to try 4.8 or maybe 5.1 and see if it works on this machine. Couldn't get the graphics to work right, and since I don't know how to use it, fixing the problem seems very difficult. Worst part is, I can get Linux drivers for this computer, every onboard thin-a-ma-bob has the proper driver, but I don't really know how to compile them for use with BSD, or linux for that matter. Need to spend some time making it work. It's a Via ITX M-9000 machine. Nice little unit that I use for online stuff mostly, energy efficient for those 4+GB downloads

[stiltman]

Since the last (other) version Linux I used was Mandrake 8.2 I wanted to get some opinions on what people thought of the various distros of Linux. What is good about a particular distro, what is bad...

I've used Redhat/Mandrake/Turbo/Debian/FreeSCO/SuSE/

I still like Mandrake the most
I used FreeSCO for about 2 years as a router and it was very good

[gcutler]

I like Redhat myself mostly for the server features, but if I was going to recommend as a workstation for friends, Mandrake seemed the best option.

And as long as you have hardware 6 months old or older and the latest release of Linux, chances are you will never have to worry about dealing with unsupported hardware.

[The village idiot]

so long Space Cowboy...

[sterno]

Red Hat and SuSE are popular in the corporate world because they have companies backing them. As a result, they're officially supported by the "big boys" like IBM and Oracle for their server products. I haven't done much with SuSE, but Red Hat is sadly lacking in quality control. Being a commercial distribution that targets inexperienced people for a large part of their retail business, they benefit from pushing out new versions with all the latest and not-quite-tested software. Staying at least one major release behind will give you a decent server, though.

Debian is a lot more solid, and apt-get absolutely kicks ass as an updating tool. But Debian tends to spend a lot more time polishing a release to perfection, so they have a much longer release cycle. If you want the newest versions of software you'll often have to use unofficial packages. Occasionally you'll have to deal with licensing stupidity - Debian aims to be a totally free system, and sometimes people will push to compromise functionality to satisfy their ideals. Debian has a very large number of packages, and they support multiple hardware platforms with a nearly-identical system. A Debian install is also a little more friendly to older hardware than Red Hat, and Debian has some standard tools that are better suited to an average workstation than the default ones shipped by other distributions.

Slackware is very much a do-it-yourself system. I like it, but then I've worked with a lot of UNIX systems. It's much more like a traditional/commercial UNIX system than most other Linux distributions. Sometimes they'll put the latest-and-greatest versions of software in a release, other times they'll hold off because it looks too buggy. Overall they've managed to find a decent balance most of the time.

Mandrake started out as a Red Hat clone. Eventually they actually made some changes, like trying to add lots of automatic hardware detection and focusing on the desktop instead of general use or servers. I never really used it, no reason to.

Knoppix is pretty cool, it's built from Debian but very different. It's a run-from-CD system, you boot the CD and it goes straight to a logged-in graphical session (KDE on a current standard Knoppix CD). It has pretty advanced hardware detection and automatic configuration. It's the kind of thing you'd want for a kiosk because most things that need to run as root just automagically do it, and by default it doesn't provide any hard drive access. It supports saving your configuration settings and so on to something like a floppy or USB thumb drive.

Most of the rest are just based on one of the above. Some are special-purpose, like the ones aimed for firewall/NAT use. Sometimes they have a different focus, like aiming for multimedia or educational systems. Sometimes they're just aimed for people with different preferences, like the Knoppix variants that boot to GNOME instead of KDE.

[gcutler]

so long Space Cowboy...

rrrrrrrrrrrSpike....rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr