Linux Distro's

[zen]

Anyone got any preferences ? As a novice user I've tried Mandy,Redhat and SuSe all for user friendlyness and my findings are :

1st.................SuSe 8.2........mounts all your windows drives with fast access to them.............if only they sort that boot prob out!

2nd .................Redhat 9...........Very professional........no immediate access to windows,you have to do a bit of command line work to mount them,plus the sound server is off by default so you have to find it to get any CD's to play 1!

3rd................Mandrake 9.1...........To cluttered.......alot of stuff not working right

[scarecrow]

Linux is effectively one- what changes are the included packages and the administration tools.
Adding a couple of fstab entries to mount your Windows partitions is not so difficult, although all three distros can do that under their administration tools too- so no need for console. They can even mount NTFS partitions as read/write (current kernel versions allow this luxury), but this is not advisable.
Personally I use Mandrake 9.1, which had many applications broken when released (no surprise, the same happened with version 9.0). Applying the up-to-date fixes "most" things work OK. Red Hat has virtually cut the knot with KDE, which is not really to my likings, and SuSE is great, but commercial, which is also not to my likings...

[N.B.]

RedHat has my vote ...

SuSE was the worst distro I ever installed !
It was unstable, many things were broken by default and yast, omg, will never start that iggy thing again

[N.B.]

RedHat has my vote ...

SuSE was the worst distro I ever installed !
It was unstable, many things were broken by default and yast, omg, will never start that iggy thing again

[Seb]

Hiya NB,
I don't agree...
Mandrake is the worst distro.

[scarecrow]

Mandrake has LOTS of things broken by default, but once you get the idea it aint difficult to fix them... after all both official updates and Cooker are available 24/7. In general Mandrake is damn good stuff, but the project admin team has the bad habbit to release TOO MUCH and TOO FAST. In fact everything after ver.6 had some good parts broken.

If you want absolute stability at the cost of manual configuration and lack of online updates, Slackware may be your choice. For absolute beginners mandrake is just fine, and Knoppix is great too: can run also from CD, just one installation CD, fine optimized Debian Woody Core and probably the best KDE3 impementation I've seen in any distro.
But @ the net end the best distro is ANY distro: read+ learn.

[serjer]

well said scarecrow
i say slack & debian for those who's got experience in linux and want no extravagants useless progs
my vote goes to suse,no longer a great enthousiastic RH fan
heard once RH had security holes
beginners go 4 mandrake

[scarecrow]

Slack and Debby are two completely different beasts...
Slack does not issue a new release until eveything is well sorted, in fact Slack betas are way more ironed than any distro "final". It's just the slack philosophy the one which discards evrything luxurious in favour of proven, working, reliable stuff.
Debby offers the current stable release, as well an "edge of the knife" beta which is good for daring guys only... after all the "apt-get" .deb installation method is tailor made for cvs hunters. And that beta release is currently no less than TEN (!!!) CD's...
I'm pretty sure I'll switch to Debby one of these days, but I must get ADSL first, and play a little bit more with buggy "dull" releases like Mandrake 9.X... fixing the bugs is probably the best lesson you can ever have on Unix.

[LTR12101B]

I thought Mandrake was essentially REDHAT based and "Pentium pre-tuned".

Though perhaps, doing your own recompile options may be a useful excercise in itself - not sure HOW much difference it makes, or how many stages of tweaking there are -

I believe the minimum level is 386 (not sure if that includes 387 maths support if present).
486 - some minor instruction tuning
Pentium
And then what?

[scarecrow]

Mandrake is really close to Redhat...probably as much Mars is to Alpha Centauri. And of course it also comes in PPC and Sparc flavours.
There are absoluteely no ties between the California based RedHat and Paris based Mandrakesoft... RedHat is closely linked to Apple (maybe less than the way SuSE is linked to Intel), and Mandrakesoft has partnership links with many mid-sized software developers, but no real ties to anyone (that's probably the reason they had filed for bankruptcy three months ago).

[zen]

Well,as much as I like SuSE I've had to switch back to Red Hat as I could'nt get SuSE to run on DSL even with setting up the network card and configuring the dsl connection,worked fine on dial up.Tried Knoppix as well,impressed me how it all runs from the CD and net access all set up in less than 5 mins.

[LTR12101B]

Maybe it was the package management I was thinking of, or perhaps I'm out of date?

As I recall, there seem to be two main frontend biases (KDE or Gnome) and three main "styles" - REDHAT (RPM), Debian (DEB) and Slackware (does it have package management)

Suse and Caldera seem to be distanced from that - and then there are MANY smaller distributions - a true software democracy.

[scarecrow]

Regarding Caldera, they have effectively stopped developing their Open Linux project ages ago... in fact they still offer a line of Linux products (under the SCO umbrella), but none of them is really available- if you go to Caldera homesite you will get the same msg for every one of them: "The sale of this SCO Linux product to new customers is currently suspended due to intellectual property (IP) issues associated with the Linux operating system".
Suffice to say that they have left the scene long ago... in Fact Corel had make a deal with them, but even Corel Linux should be considered obsolete by now. That's a shame, cause Open Linux was a very promising idea.
Gnome and KDE are not really competing each other (many KDE applications still need GTK libraries to compile, and a few Gnome ones need QT libraries), but they have gone east-west at some time... RedHat has very bad relations with the KDE developing team, after the former introduced some completely broken KDE environments in former RH official releases (the current one is no better, either...) and some other distros began releasing broken Gnome desktops after the Gnome founder signed in as developer for Windows 2003 desktop.

[serjer]

i had bad experience with the last distros of caldera.
did corel linux got bought by ms ?
& wat happen to united linux?any news ?

[scarecrow]

Regarding Corel Linux, I think that the speculation is unfounded... MS never had any real intentions to buy them, Corel just left the scene.
And United Linux is just a very loose coalition of some major Linux brands (SuSE, SCO, Connectiva, Turbolinux). I think you should not take the whole "United Linux" idea too seriously.