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Beginner's Guide to Linux Distros
Martin writes "TipMonkies has a nice overview of various Linux distros for those of you with little time to research each distro yourself. The article also discusses some of the advantages/disadvantages of each distro." From the article: "SUSE- The 'U' is hard and the 'E' is soft. Almost like the word sue with an S on the end. SUSE is the other big commercial distro. It was when it was still it's own company in Germany, and now even bigger since being purchased by Novell."
I dunno... while much of this dude's article seemed accurate, after reading the above, I've come to the conclusion that even after all his years of experience, he's still a newb... or he's just plain smoking crack.
/dev/random
I still just want a distro that works great with my Thinkpad laptop.
I've been through Debian installs so many times, and I get so close, but there's always one thing or another I can't quite get (used to be sound, now I got that working but the darn thing won't sleep anymore)... I tried Kanotix, again the sleeping issue... downloading Ubuntu now. (Yes, in case you can't tell by the list I'm a big Debian fan... but Fedora is next on the torrent list, lousy 2.7GB download though)
Is there a reason laptops are so tricky for linux, and yes I know all about linuxforlaptops.com and the other websites which cater, but still, the installs are frustrating, the wireless has finally gotten to a point where it's ok, but still not great (enabling wep and connecting to a varity of networks etc)...
Does a "for laptops" distro exist?, I'd love it, hell I'd help with it if my skills could be used.
Sidenote: The old debian installer had much better support for laptops than the new one!
It's actually full of errors.
He's already corrected the first one (SUSE, being from Germany, is not pronounced with a silent 'E') but more remain. For instance, he confuses Debian testing and unstable, reversing them.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Heh... I must be an old fart at heart, then. Sometimes I certainly feel like one (at 26). I was attracted to Linux mostly because it looked difficult. Now please bear with me, I'll get to my points soon. First a tiny bit of background.
I first tried some version (1.x.y) in '94 but it threw a kernel panic almost instantly (I reasoned it was due to my 540MB Conner harddrive using some kind of "EasyBIOS") and didn't know how to fix it (didn't have the 'net to look to for help either). I put it away, and installed Win95 (alpha :). Years passed.
I've now used Slackware since 7.1, currently running 10.0 on my servers; I'll probably never use anything else on them. However, for my desktop I wanted something pretty with windows and graphics, looking to kill Windows completely. I still haven't :)
I've tried the "graphical" Linuxen since the first Corel. Since then I've been through Mandrake [8-10], SuSe [5-9.2], RedHat [5-7] and Fedora Core [2,3].
My experience is that they're all easy to install (even for a non-techie) and by default boots into a pretty-looking graphical system. But if that was everything that was offered, users with the need for little more than a web browser and word processor would be at a loss. A GUI way of configuring a complete Linux system, and all other apps being a GUI, would be so slow to use (click, click, click, type, click, type, click click) you'd develop RSI in a week. With a casual, non-techie user, fine; but the pros would commit suicude in droves. Or code a GUI app with nothing but a large text window to interface the system using self-invented textual command aliases for the GUI apps ("an atrocity, I tell you! You can't even use the mouse!" -Tilly) :)
Imagine doing a simple search/replace on text in a bunch of files with nothing but a GUI having radio buttons and checkboxen for all possible options... Of course, there would be no regular expression text input available; that would be a too difficult syntax for the user to understand. And to process those results further, you'd have to save the results and start another app to do it.
Unless an app was created specifically to do that chain of tasks. But then we'd end up with a uncomprehensible number of apps tailored to one weird, specific task. The command line just can't go away.
Blogs are mainly just the Geocities homepage of the 2000s.
- j-joshers
Gentoo for me has never been about performance increases, it's been about packages compiled with the options I wanted, instead of what the maintainer wanted.
No, I didn't want mysql when I installed postfix, no, I didn't really need libjpeg/libtiff/libpng to install samba, no, this box is a server and I don't want X, why is php dependant on X! (and other weird package dependencies I've noticed in various distribs)
The flipside of the coin is that perhaps I want php or something compiled against postgresql or some other combination of modules which, for instance, fedora or debian won't allow me to have? Gentoo gets around this rather well as everything is compiled and you can link packages against the libs that you want. Also since you're compiling it yourself for your system you know it'll work whereas you can't be sure with rpms these days as they can be made for any number of distribs.
Gentoo is for advanced users who don't mind compile times and like having things customized the way they want it. It's not a bad distrib, don't knock it because of some of the users.