Other Distros

Post by **Devari** » Wed May 25, 2005 8:20 am

It seems to me that the *nix users here are limited to SuSE, Mandriva, and Fedora Core. Has anyone tried anything other than these three?

I have used:
Red Hat 7.x
FreeBSD 5.3
Mandrakelinux 10.1

I might try the following:
Ubuntu (On Recommendation by a Debian enthusiast I know)
SuSE (Because... It's there?)
Knoppix (For kicks, you know. LiveCD sounds cool.)
Source Mage (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_Mage_GNU/Linux) ('cause it looks hella funny)

I've been thinking of taking my two Win2k trial (it was for a course) boxxen and converting them to servers, or at least testing stuff with them. They're rather old PIIs - it was a heck of a time getting picky old Win2k to install.

Post by **windhound** » Wed May 25, 2005 6:09 pm

I'm fairly happy with my Fedora Core 3.. few glitches.. my wireless just died.. somehow when I logged into windows it changed my card's mac address, which.. I thought that wasnt supposed to change.. its a sticker on the bottom of my 'puter O.o... neah... its semi-working.. right now just plugged into the wall..

but yeah
I tried XFLD (based on Knoppix, thus Debian) downloaded to my hdd, and I didnt really like the setup.. if I had spent some time with it I probably could have made it useable.. for some reason every time I tried to go into my /mnt/ folder it took 2 min and a ton of resources.. rather odd..

Gentoo is supposed to be decent, for thoes who 'like to see how things work' but you dont even get a graphical installer.. you read instruction manuals and get to play with code and prompts.. maybe some people like that.. I like Mandrake, Fedora, and I assume SuSe's approch.. choise what packages you want, hit the button, and watch the little line move across the screen...

I didnt really realized how many different distros there were.. here's a listing from http://distrowatch.com/
[quote="<URL url="http://distrowatch.com/+--%3E%3C/div%3E ... watch.com/"]
Rank Distribution H.P.D*
1 Ubuntu
2 Mandriva
3 MEPIS
4 Fedora
5 SUSE
6 Debian
7 KNOPPIX
8 Gentoo
9 Slackware
10 darn Small
11 Xandros
12 FreeBSD
13 PCLinuxOS
14 SLAX
15 KANOTIX
16 CentOS
17 Libranet
18 Vector
19 Red Hat
20 Arch
21 Yoper
22 Linspire
23 Kubuntu
24 Vidalinux
25 Puppy
26 Feather
27 Gnoppix
28 Ark
29 Vine
30 GeeXboX
31 Devil
32 IPCop
33 White Box
34 Minislack
35 Turbolinux
36 aLinux
37 PC-BSD
38 ClarkConnect
39 Kurumin
40 Yellow Dog
41 Aurox
42 LFS
43 BeatrIX
44 Lormalinux
45 SAM
46 Frugalware
47 Buffalo
48 OpenBSD
49 FreeSBIE
50 Lycoris
51 AGNULA
52 Solaris
53 Berry
54 SME Server
55 Hakin9
56 CRUX
57 PHLAK
58 Morphix
59 YES
60 NetBSD
61 Linux4all
62 LiveCD Router
63 Scientific
64 Progeny
65 Novell
66 Knoppix STD
67 DragonFly
68 Conectiva
69 BIG LINUX
70 Zen
71 Overclockix
72 dyne:bolic
73 Lineox
74 CCux
75 AUSTRUMI
76 MoviX
77 QiLinux
78 Astaro
79 Onebase
80 Knopperdisk
81 Mandows
82 Mediainlinux
83 SmoothWall
84 BLAG
85 tinysofa
86 Lunar
87 ADIOS
88 UHU-Linux
89 ParallelKnoppix
90 Navyn OS
91 Sun JDS
92 Specifix
93 Trustix
94 m0n0wall
95 Foresight
96 Tao
97 redWall
98 ROCK
99 ASPLinux
100 K12LTSP[/quote]

Post by **The Beatles** » Wed May 25, 2005 6:31 pm

I tried an Ubuntu installer for my friend's laptop. It was OK, but the lack of nice setup tools like on Mandriva wasn't very good. It's default desktop is Gnome (*shudder*) but you can get the xfld-desktop from www.os-cillation.com. Never got wireless working more than intermittently. Mandrake has drakroam.

Tried Debian Sarge, ugh, never even got to setting X up right... Mandriva has pampered me I suppose. Although truth to tell I spent a day fiddling about with XFree86. Well Debian's OK for a server I guess.

My friend runs SuSE and is happy with it... what can I say? YaST is excellent, probably beats even DrakX, although never tried wireless with it. It's got an extremely detailed X setup though. It's a professional distro, y'know.

I ran Red Hat 5 and Red Hat 9, well again, what can I say, I had no problems. I didn't administer them, so I didn't do much setup, but they seemed to run flawlessly, and were designed with detail in mind.

Knoppix is nice, but pretty much a one-way-street when you come right down to it. Well a one-way 6-lane boulevard to be quite fair.

I've had real experience only with Mandriva, Debian, and Ubunut for administering machines though, and Mandriva comes out on top hands down in that.

~Beatles

Post by **windhound** » Fri May 27, 2005 12:18 am

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fedora_Core)
June 6, 2005 - Fedora Core 4 Stable

w00t

Post by **Devari** » Mon May 30, 2005 7:24 am

The Beatles wrote: I tried an Ubuntu installer for my friend's laptop. It was OK, but the lack of nice setup tools like on Mandriva wasn't very good. It's default desktop is Gnome (*shudder*) but you can get the xfld-desktop from www.os-cillation.com. Never got wireless working more than intermittently. Mandrake has drakroam.

Tried Debian Sarge, ugh, never even got to setting X up right... Mandriva has pampered me I suppose. Although truth to tell I spent a day fiddling about with XFree86. Well Debian's OK for a server I guess.

My friend runs SuSE and is happy with it... what can I say? YaST is excellent, probably beats even DrakX, although never tried wireless with it. It's got an extremely detailed X setup though. It's a professional distro, y'know.

I ran Red Hat 5 and Red Hat 9, well again, what can I say, I had no problems. I didn't administer them, so I didn't do much setup, but they seemed to run flawlessly, and were designed with detail in mind.

Knoppix is nice, but pretty much a one-way-street when you come right down to it. Well a one-way 6-lane boulevard to be quite fair.

I've had real experience only with Mandriva, Debian, and Ubunut for administering machines though, and Mandriva comes out on top hands down in that.

~Beatles

For kicks and giggles I burnt the latest Knoppix and tryed it on an older machine - a PII 400 Mhz with 192 MB RAM.

UG! Because of the nature of Knoppix, starting up even Firefox was a wait. Why anyone would attempt to use it in a regular work setting is beyond me. Sure, it's easy to set up, and doesn't touch your harddrive, but the speed hit you take on program startup is enormous... And if you have the hardware to make it run fast, you surely would have enough space for a disk partition...

GNOME is not your friend. Seriously. Out of interest, was it the latest release of Ubuntu you tried? Or one of the older ones...?

Of course, an attractive thing about debian is apt-get. Urpmi comes close though, apparently. I suppose if Ubuntu gets really good it might be a better debian distro than debian itself.

I kinda want t o try SuSE... I wonder how it would run on a PII with 64 MB RAM...

Post by **windhound** » Tue May 31, 2005 10:34 pm

you can get apt for Fedora (and other distros as well I believe)
though, I'm learning more about yum.. and its rather spiffy..

Knoppix will not run on a P1 with 64 megs of ram.. though, not much does

it tried.. but it wasnt done loading after an hour, so meh
it only has a 2 gig hdd as well.. 3/4 which is full.. so not much room for a swap space..

I 'spose if it had enough swap it would have been better off..

Slasher · Post by **Slasher** » Thu Jun 16, 2005 4:41 pm

wheeeee *is installing Red Hat Enterpraise Workstation V4 on VMWare*

EDIT: Gahh it won't find my flippin' Virtual Hard Drive

sh0e · Post by **sh0e** » Thu Jun 16, 2005 5:03 pm

slackware > you

Slasher · Post by **Slasher** » Thu Jun 16, 2005 5:26 pm

eh y'what?

Post by **windhound** » Thu Jun 16, 2005 6:30 pm

slackware is 'nother distro

why RH Enterprise? why not Fedora for just a home PC, given that's what you're on...

people have different tastes.. what was it.. there was one distro out there that people concider themselves superior to others 'cause it doesnt have a graphical installer and the video driver takes hours to install.. say they learn about their os..

that may be so, but a 30 min full, autoinstall with Fedora is nicer for me.. I'm lazy.. I'll play with yum and repositories and dependencies, but give me a gui installer...

(btw, installing Windows is /still/ a pain.. its idiotic.. Fedora, Mandrake, SuSe, and probably several other /free/ operating systems have a fully functional GUI installer, but half of windows is still rather messy and not at all fun.. formatting the hdd for windows takes hours, instead of less than two min it takes with most linux...)

Slasher · Post by **Slasher** » Thu Jun 16, 2005 6:39 pm

Ahh right, I see.

Because I spent 11 hours odd downloading this one now

Post by **Devari** » Thu Jun 16, 2005 6:50 pm

Gentoo, windy.

Post by **bjornredtail** » Thu Jun 16, 2005 7:36 pm

I've got Redhat 7.2 or so on my PI 166, with a 4 GB HDD and 64 MB of Ram... Setup seemed to work ok, but I can't seem to get the network working. It might have something to do with the fact I have no idea what I am doing... Or not...

Post by **windhound** » Thu Jun 16, 2005 8:01 pm

or that you're using an old version of Redhat

atleast upgrade to 9..
or move to Fedora.. havnt had a problem with networking..

an yeah.. Gentoo it was..

Post by **bjornredtail** » Thu Jun 16, 2005 10:08 pm

Neither will run on my old hardware...

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