Ive got Windows XP installed atm, as well as Knoppix.

What I want is a nice linux-type (this includes BSD btw) distro that is good for middle skill users, and for desktops.

The ones ive played with:
- Redhat 8/9
- Mandrake 9.1(I think)/10
- Debian Woody
- Knoppix

Without a doubt, my favourite would be Debian. Unfortunatly, it doesnt work too well on my hardware:

P4 2.4 w/ HT
Radeon 9600XT
SB LIVE!(crap) 5.1 w/ 5.1 speaker system.

The main purpose of this is a desktop system, that is solid, nothing too mainstream, one which I can learn in and in the future, replace Windows in preperation for this Palladium #*(&.

Im tempted to
- Slackware
- OpenBSD (hell.. 1 security hole in 7 years aint half bad)

Any others?
(A little pros/cons would be much appriciated )

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Founder of the Massassi Brute Squad (MBS)

B'tduz: A popular dwarfish game which consists of standing a few feet apart and throwing large rocks at one another's head.

"Yes, it's a bloody flying alligator setting fire to my city!" - His Grace His Excellency the Duke of Ankh, Commander Sir Samuel Vimes.

Morituri Nolumus Mori

SuSE. Im serious. Youll problably have to pay out for it, but its worth every dime.

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I used to believe that we must fight the future, lest change come without our consent. I was wrong. The truth is that we must embrace the future, for only with change can we remain the same.

Don't buy it. You'll feel obligated to use it even if you don't want to. *glares at purchased MS software*

I've tried almost all of those. Some are good, some are bad. However, you will find that *the* biggest problem with linux these days is package managment and maintenence. This aspect is the most important part of choosing a distro.

The best package managment I've seen is in Debian. If you can get Debian to work, then good for you. You may want to try an Sarge Debian (unstable) ftp install.

You may want to try something RPM based. However, Redhat network is slow, and for some reason I could never even sign up. *shrugs* SuSe, again, charges you cash. You don't have to buy it, however, if you use their ftp network install disk. I have no experience with SuSe, but I hear it is quite good, and they have a live CD demo disk.

My weapon of choice, Gentoo Linux, is the hard-core-do-it-yourself-your a-total-nerd flavor. In my eyes, Gentoo not only is the best distro out there, but it has the brightest future as well.

• Do-it-yourself philosiphy. For installation, you are given a command prompt. No more, no less. You manually copy files over and compile them from the source. But this is far from difficult, which brings me to my third point.
• Portage. Similar to Debian's apt-get, resolves dependecies for you, downloads the source code from *fast* mirrors, configures the GNU compiler for you, compiles each package in order, and copies everything for you. You never upgrade the distro, as it is always 'evolving.' Example: You type 'emerge sync' to get the latest portage tree which contains 'ebuilds' for each package. You then type 'emerge system' and 'emerge world' to upgrade your system and applications, respectivly.
• Is the installation scaring you? It shouldn't, because Gentoo has *the* best user commumity at http://forums.gentoo.org .It also boasts some of the cleanest and most complete documentation. After a week with Gentoo, you will learn so much. It's the perfect combo: do it yourself, but with good documentation.
• Gentoo is a younger distro, yet it is progressing very rapidly. It's stable packages are very current, and you don't often have to use masked, or unstable / depriciated, packages.

I'd also like to mention that with Gentoo, you never install any extra crap. It only does what you tell it to do. This way, everthing is fast, clean, minimalistic, and optimized for your processors archtecture. (do a search on USE flags)

So, uh, run whatever the hell you want.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Gentoo!

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I check my e-mail.

[This message has been edited by Mystic0 (edited May 02, 2004).]

[This message has been edited by Mystic0 (edited May 02, 2004).]

[This message has been edited by Mystic0 (edited May 02, 2004).]

[This message has been edited by Mystic0 (edited May 02, 2004).]

Fedora. I have SBLive 5.1 and haven't had any trouble at all with it. Fedora autodetected it without turning off Plug and Play.
It also comes with yum (Yellowdog Update Manager) which is very similar to apt-get. (if you do go with it, reconfigure yum to access different rpm repositories (i can help with that))

I like Fedora. There are RPM's at www.freshrpms.net and AFAIK all the RH9 RPM's will work with it too.

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To artificial life, all reality is virtual.
HTP
babble, babble, b!tch, b!tch, rebel, rebel, party, party.

someone explain palladium? eh I'll just check google.

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Saberopus: omfq musical genuis j00 >mozart
Thrawn42689: Mozart = n00b

Read that thread titled "What do you hate about Micrsoft the most" (or something like that)

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I check my e-mail.

hmm... that bites.

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Saberopus: omfq musical genuis j00 >mozart
Thrawn42689: Mozart = n00b

Yep, especially since companies like Intel are members of Trusted computing. Where will linux users get their hardware, the dump?

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I check my e-mail.

I'm tellin' ya, other companies that make processors, like Sun, will start to gain market share. First for thier non-compliance with Palladium, then for thier quality as they grow in that market.

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To artificial life, all reality is virtual.
HTP
babble, babble, b!tch, b!tch, rebel, rebel, party, party.

Transmeta...

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I used to believe that we must fight the future, lest change come without our consent. I was wrong. The truth is that we must embrace the future, for only with change can we remain the same.

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=7200

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I check my e-mail.

Nah see you can turn it off. Well..supposdly.

So we get linux, we turn it off, everything works, up yours TCPA.

We get fewer stuff, but hell, its better than going with that %#(*&#


edit:
Cheers Mystic. Ill look carefully at Gentoo. I think I know how to get Debian to work now, because ive whacked in a NIC I know will work (im not using onboard anymore).
But nevertheless, Ill look at Gentoo...you have my interest
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Founder of the Massassi Brute Squad (MBS)

B'tduz: A popular dwarfish game which consists of standing a few feet apart and throwing large rocks at one another's head.

"Yes, it's a bloody flying alligator setting fire to my city!" - His Grace His Excellency the Duke of Ankh, Commander Sir Samuel Vimes.

Morituri Nolumus Mori

[This message has been edited by SithNazgul (edited May 02, 2004).]

Oh well. I guess its all UltraSPARCs for me...

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I used to believe that we must fight the future, lest change come without our consent. I was wrong. The truth is that we must embrace the future, for only with change can we remain the same.

AMD works fine in linux...now. Though I think they're part of this palladium thing too.

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There is no signature

Major Companies that are in the Trusted Computing Alliance:

• Microsoft
• IBM (wtf, I thought they were pro linux???)
• Novell (again, wtf, they own SuSe linux???)
• Verisign (this is scary, they own .com, .net, and .org domains... I wonder what this means)
• nVidia (This is strange, as they have been very comited to linux with their drivers)
• Intel
• AMD

Major Companies that are NOT in the Trusted Computing Alliance:

• Sun
• ATI?

That's pretty scary. Sun is a small company, and things with them are in the air right now, especially with the future of Java and whether or not it should be GPL'ed.

How can the companies that are commited to linux be a part of this? Things don't add up here.

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I check my e-mail.

[This message has been edited by Mystic0 (edited May 02, 2004).]

I just installed Suse 9.0 over the weekend after buying it off ebay for $AUS 5.50. It is great. I was extremely happy when it automatically configured itself so I could access my windows partition from the Suse desktop. It detected all my hardware perfectly (even my wheel mouse)

Installing the nVidia drivers was slightly trickier as there is a small bug that tells you that you can't enable 3d acceleration, even though it is already enabled. *shrugs* It's not all that difficult to work out the rest of it, I'd only been using linux for about 30 mins and figured it out.

Gentoo's awesome if you have a lot of time and want to learn a lot. It's not hard to install, it just takes a day or two.

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BV's rendition of Titanic: Let's have sex. I won't let go. I don't need this stone.
The End.
~ Wolfy

Yeah, theres some sort of bug in the 3d accell code in SAX2. You *can* enable it, its just a little tricky on some systems. Hopefully they will iron out those bugs in 9.1.

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I used to believe that we must fight the future, lest change come without our consent. I was wrong. The truth is that we must embrace the future, for only with change can we remain the same.

WTF... suse isn't free?


I thought that was the whole point of linux...

Can't you still grab the suse isos from linuxiso.org?



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Old aunts used to come up to me at weddings, poking me in the ribs and cackling, telling me, "You're next." They stopped after I started doing the same thing to them at funerals.

Can you grab an full ISO? No.

Do you have access to the source code to everything licensed under the GPL? Yes, which makes it legal. Is this a practical or relalistic method of installation? Hell no.

SuSe claims that some of their software included is priopetrary, so they 'can't' give you an ISO. It's pretty cheap.

What you can do, however, is download their ftp disk (an ISO image), which installs it by downloading everything you choose to install each time you use it.

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I check my e-mail.

[This message has been edited by Mystic0 (edited May 03, 2004).]

[This message has been edited by Mystic0 (edited May 03, 2004).]

OpenBSD is very nice. Doesn't always have packages updated though, since they care more about security and cleanliness than they do cutting edge.

FreeBSD would probably make a better desktop, if you still want to go the *BSD route. FreeBSD also has the best handbook, hands down. I've never seen one as clear or concise as FreeBSD's. Their ports system is very similar to portage as well, works pretty much the same way, minus emerge. Doesn't take two days to install either (more like twenty minutes) and it only takes an hour or so to recompile the whole base system (well, on a newer processor).

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[This message has been edited. Deal with it.]

TCPA has nothing to do with pro or con Linux. It is a security chip that has many more uses than enabling Microsoft to rule the world. I don't know much about it (what I know I know from my brother who is more into the security-part of IT), but I think it isn't too bad to have a chip that let's you securely scramble your files so that the uber-evil Microsoft, CIA and NSA and whoever can't read them.

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Sorry for the lousy English

I dont need extra hardware to secure my data. Infact, I garuntee you this hardware will give Microsoft and the NSA a direct back door into your system and all your data. MARK MY WORDS.

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I used to believe that we must fight the future, lest change come without our consent. I was wrong. The truth is that we must embrace the future, for only with change can we remain the same.

True. The only way to keep people out of oyur system when this nightmare happens would be to unplug your ethernet or phone cable...




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Old aunts used to come up to me at weddings, poking me in the ribs and cackling, telling me, "You're next." They stopped after I started doing the same thing to them at funerals.

Haha, I bet it won't work if you arn't connected...

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I check my e-mail.

It doesnt.

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Founder of the Massassi Brute Squad (MBS)

B'tduz: A popular dwarfish game which consists of standing a few feet apart and throwing large rocks at one another's head.

"Yes, it's a bloody flying alligator setting fire to my city!" - His Grace His Excellency the Duke of Ankh, Commander Sir Samuel Vimes.

Morituri Nolumus Mori