Let the flame wars start!

Hmmm.

Mandrake: The distro disk booted ok on the CD drive, but then wouldn't install because it
couldn't find the CD drive.

Red Hat: It's what I have. Does not come with mp3 support (does have vorbis).
Does not come with ntfs (windows NT, 2000, or XP) file support which is important if you
have a dual boot windows/linux system. Register with them and you can get easy install
updates (sort of like windows update).

A real newbie one here, is there a real simple version that I can try out on a dual boot, or even one that I can run, just to get a taste of what to expect with Linux? I dont want all the hassle of several cd's worth of stuff if I find I dont want to use Linux, just a taster ??

http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html

Knoppix can be run from a bootable cd.

Rob

I have tried RedHat and Mandrake. I have not tried Gentoo which seems to be the popular choice!

Whats good about gentoo?

Knoppix is certainly the easiest way to see linux running on your machine without changing anything on
your system. Be aware that it runs much slower than a normal linux installation because it is using
the CD drive for most of what a normal OS would run off the hard drive. Anything you save is going
in a RAM drive which will vanish when you are done.

Knoppix is pretty good at configuring itself to your hardware. My wife's laptop has built in 802.11 (wireless networking) which I can not get to talk to our base station with winXP (so I put on a Linksys card I already had which works fine). Knoppix found the built in hardware and automatically configured it for the base station.

thanks guys, I shall look into it

I'm in love with the new Slackware (9.0) right now, cause it even runs on my older (P133) machines, includes uptodate software and is nice, simple and stable.

Gentoo seems to be very nice too. But I haven't had enough time to try it out on one of my machines, maybe when 1.4 is finally released.

Debian is always worth a mention, but for some things just too bloated/complex (debconf + apt are very powerful).

Knoppix and RedHat are the first choices for Linux newbies. And while being easy to install and configure, both don't try to hide the power of GNU/Linux like others (Lindows, Mandrake, Lycoris etc.)

Two nice newcomers seem to be Crux and College Linux, which both follow the KISS principle like Slackware.

dev0

I use FreeBSD

Red Hat 8.0 was easy to install (easy to get system capable to play Oggs). Haven't tried anything other than old Red Hat and Debian (install not made for my "skills").

No offence, but when did FreeBSD become a linux distro?

By the way, I prefer ClarkConnect and Redhat.

Why Gentoo is the hottest distro now can be summarized in one word: portage
Combines the best of both worlds between ports and apt-get, you have by far the best package management tool. Being able to custom build all your stuffs optimized for your processor and needs is great too.

dev0: you don't need to wait until 1.4 is out. You should get pretty much the same thing no matter which installer you use after you do an "emerge update world". The only difference between the RCs are the installer packages available. rc2 may be prefered over rc3 for those who don't want to compile because custom tarballs for the most common processors are available in rc2 but not in rc3.

Does rc3 have a fixed bootdisk, which can use PC-Card ethernet-cards?

My choice has been Debian since around 1998. The overall package quality and cohesion tends to be quite a bit higher than anything else I've seen, and for me it's just the right balance of providing a good framework for default configuration and then getting out of my way for real work.

I see Gentoo as the new Slackware. It's valuable in that you'll be doing everything yourself and thus learning quite a bit in the process. Personally I don't see it having any merit besides that. The build system is a nice idea, but the actual benefits from compiling everything for your architecture are neglible as far as I've seen. I also wouldn't want to have to deal with compiling every package on my system in a way that makes sense.

I see Mandrake recommended a lot for newbies but I haven't actually seen it in action.

I used to use Debian before switching to Gentoo. I'd also used Mandrake, Redhat, Slackware, Suse, other more obscure distros, and even rolled my own with LFS once. Regarding Debian, my biggest annoyance with the distro was that packages were typically never up to date with the latest software releases, even in the unstable stuff. Sometimes I'd find myself waiting weeks to months just to get an updated X or gnome setup going. Maybe things are different now, but with Gentoo there are typically build scripts available for updated software within an hour to a day of it's release.

Also, I often found that even though Debian's package management system was nice, configuration issues were never as simple or as clear as they could be, and the documentation was typically quite poor or scattered.



Hrmm.. I don't think this is a good analogy. I don't really think Gentoo is quite like any other Linux distro. If anything, it's probably somewhere between Slack, LFS, and Debian, but being easier to use/configure/maintain/update then all 3.

Configuration issues under Gentoo are surprisingly simple... more than with other distros I've tried. Couple that with it's excellent step by step documentation and tutorials, and you've definitely got a winning combination.



It's not just "compiling for your architecture", it's also compiling with the options you want, and only those options. Speed increases are real also, especially now with vectorization support in GCC. You get a very fast setup with only the stuff you specifically want and nothing else. No more wondering about whether or not some weird packages have been installed
that you didn't really want or need or something like that. You have complete control, but at the same time it's not overwhelmingly complex or hard to maintain.

You really don't have to "worry about compiling every package in a way that makes sense". Gentoo doesn't work that way really, it's not that complex. Sure, it may take a little bit of reading the (well written) docs to decide how you want things setup originally, but it's definitely not hard.

I get the impression from your statements that you haven't actually given Gentoo a try. Maybe I'm wrong though If so however, you should certainly give it a shot before making judgements about how well it actually works in practice.



Personally I would rather recommend Gentoo to a newbie then Mandrake. They'll end up learning Linux rather then how to use some fancy (and often buggy) gui configuration stuff that does not explain exactly what it is doing to your system...

yep.
incidentally, #gentoo is the most popular linux distro channel on irc.freenode.net and you can easily get lots of friendly help from there.

Last time I checked (2 mins ago) #debian still had more people than #gentoo, but I agree that gentoo is a much friendlier channel.
#slackware is always nice too...

BTW. Pat Volkerding (the slackware guy) seems to be into audio compression recently. He mentions both FLAC and Vorbis in the Release_Notes for Slackware 9.0:


He mentions FLAC and Vorbis, but not glibc or XFree...

Maybe someone should drop him a mail leading him to HA on the web and we'll have the first MPC out-of-the-box distro soon .

dev0

I'm currently using Debian 3.0 with Gnome 2.2. Before that I had used SuSE, Mandrake and Red Hat. Currently I'm testing Slackware 9.0 while running Debian as main Distro.

Sadly I'm still bound to MS Windows... Hopefully I'll get together some cash to buy a Mac (w00t) and get rid of MS.