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City of Vienna Chooses Linux
Bill Kendrick writes "Back in January, ZDNet reported that the city of Vienna, Austria was looking to move at least a portion of its desktops to Linux. Well, it looks like it happened (in German; use the fish). Their official distro is based on Debian with KDE, and is called WEINUX." Update: 07/06 12:49 GMT by T : Several readers wrote to correct the spelling here: the correct name of the distro is "WIENUX."
Seriously, I have always been a big fan of Debian. SuSE was a close second, but getting it is more of a pain in the ass. Often their ftp is slow, and cryptic to find for newbies. I think SuSE preffers people buying their boxed sets. Having said that, I have found SuSE to be an great desktop replacement for windows. Everything works out of the box, no tinkering required.
But my #1 choice is Debian. The apt-get is the hands down winner for getting new packages. I always hated Red Hat because as soon as I ran into a dependancy problem, I knew the rest of my day was booked. Mandrake just plain sucks in my humble opinion. It looks unprofessional, and weak. Debian, on the other hand, can be a pain in the but to instal, but once you get it up and running, it is unbeatable.
My advice to people is, if you want something easy and are willing to spend $100, get SuSE in the box. There are a ton of applications to help you configure your system. You can use SuSE to run a server, and not worry about downtime (unlike Mandrake which will crash, I have seen it happen at a linux fest, where 12 of us stood in disbelief looking at the new blue screen of death). I knew another guy who had a webserver and ssh set up on SuSE and it ran for over 200 days without a glitch (he took it down when he upgraded his system).
More advice. If your system is old, don't mess with KDE or Gnome, get IceWM. If you want to run Java, stay away from Red Hat. If you want apps wich are bran spanking new, running off the latest packages, stay away from Red Hat.
And the golden rule before installing any linux. Take 2 minutes before starting the instal, open your box, write down on paper what video card you have, what nic you have, what sound card, etc. It will save you 2 hours after instal trying to edit the conf files.
Happy 'puttering around!
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."