[wellylug] Distro of choice

David Antliff dave.antliff at paradise.net.nz
Thu Jun 17 13:46:17 NZST 2004


On Thu, 17 Jun 2004, Nick Jensen wrote:
> So tell me - what do you recommend?

I can only speak from my own experience of course.

Depends what you want to do. If you want to learn a bit more about what
goes on under the hood, and you a bit of time to spare then Gentoo might
be worth trying (it helps to have a faster machine for cross-compiling or
use a binary install if your machine is too slow, or you can end up
waiting days - literally - for KDE etc to compile). Gentoo has excellent
support (forums.gentoo.org) and works very nicely with all the latest
software.

Debian will introduce you to dpkg/apt which are handy tools to know. The
most challenging part of Debian is the installation IMO, but once you've
got past that, it's pretty straightforward. There's not quite so much to
learn as Gentoo. You can compile things from source too if you want to go
there.

Mandrake 10 sounds like a pretty decent out-of-the-box experience, but I
haven't tried it since I broke my Mandrake 8.0 install while syncing with
the security update server. It might have trouble running on an older
machine (needs a bit of grunt I imagine) and it's harder to trim down.
Both Debian and Gentoo can be very slim if you wish.

I like to keep up with the newest versions of programs I use regularly, so
I find both of these distributions (Debian unstable btw) suit me quite
well, since the latest libraries are usually available and things compile
without having to hack around with configure scripts, /lib symlinks, etc.
I've had all sorts of problems with Redhat when it came to
compiling/installing the latest XYZ program - in fact, once I got so
exasperated with the redhat server at work I created an entire vanilla
source tree in ~ ! Redhat simply doesn't work for me at all - it's too
static (and no, I don't run production servers).

If you have a reasonably large HDD, you could set up a few partitions and
run a different distro on each (I did this for a while until I settled on
Gentoo). You can share /home between all of them, and switch backwards and
forwards until you find what you are looking for. Takes a bit more work of
course, but it pays off in what you experience and learn.

As for Linux kernels, I never use the distributions 'official' kernel
management mechanism, electing to always roll my own, so I can't comment
on that aspect.

-- 
David.








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