I'm baaaa-aaak!! (from my distro tour)

[xarte]

Well that was fun and I heartily recommend it if you've got some hours to waste and are trying to choose a distro. I find that - at least on my rather old, slow laptop - a live CD doesn't really give you the full experience. Virtualboxing is, I gather, great, if it works for you - but I find just installing the dang thing works fine.

I created a swap, root and home partition, and just now also resized the home partition to leave free space for tinkering with DSL/Puppy/LFS/whatever.

Started off with Ubuntu Hardy. Mostly good. A few headaches with the wireless WEP key being translated into hex all the time, but fixed that by installing a 3d party wireless manager. Nice and easy to navigate, handy driver utility. Noted that the magazine cd with 'Linux Made Easy' didn't come with that - luckily I'd already tried a download with the goodies built in.

Tried OpenSuse live CD, didn't fancy it. Tried to Virtualbox opensolaris;crashed. COuldn't be bothered perservering.

Had a bit of a look at ubuntu 8.10 - for some reason I didn't find it as easy to find things. Getting the network set up was still a pain in the butt. Still no joy with webcam drivers (of course).

Couldn't get Slackware DVD to boot. Being a bit tired after a seriously late night, decided to put it in the too-hard basket for now. I'll definitely get back to it when I can actually focus on installation instructions enough to read them.

Installed MintLinux. Everything bar the webcam worked just dandy out of the box, even Flash, and overall enjoyed playing with it. The Mint's own edition of Firefox was a bit irritating as the google searchbar results didn't give me an Images option. Not all that keen on the menu structure, as I said in the other thread. But quite nice all the same.

Intalled OpenSuse. Still don't like it. I tried to give it some time, browsed the net, played with Pidgin and Skype, but still can't get the wireless network going and found its utilities slower and less intuitive than Ubuntu. It looks like it does have some funky stuff on board but I feel it might suit a more experienced Linux user who just skips that stuff and goes strait for CLI, or perhaps more a Windows user - I'm used to Mac these days and Ubuntu has a more OSX-like feel I think. Though ironically it was the one distro that had my webcam working straight up with no additional downloads. SO I should probably investigate what driver it's using and if it's using another layer like a camorama type program between it and Skype. If I could be bothered googling the network setup it would be more functional but I just dont' like it enough to perservere with it.

So here I am back at Ubuntu 8.04. I think this will be what I settle with for my functional desktop. It seems to do everything I need and is simple and easy to find my way around. Mint did give it a run for it's money though, and if I'd spent a bit more time on Mint I might have just stayed with it.

I've got 8 gig of spare hard drive so I can have a bit of a tinker with some lightweight distros and learn how do do things a bit more ground-up, but still have a good solid, workable desktop.

I just realized that I forgot to test something important - printing and scanning. (duh!!!!! idiot!!!) but with everything playing nice so far I don't really expect to have any issues with those.

I did find Mint more aesthetically pleasing for the most part though - Ubuntu does seem a bit chunky in comparison, but that's okay.

Edited to add: dang, I was going to try Progex. But I've just gone and downloaded an hours worth of updates.... argh.....

[steveneddy]

I don't think I realized that you were even gone.

[exploder]

If you want to look at something interesting check out SliTaz! It's a 28 MB iso and it is a complete desktop experience. SliTaz used 30 MB of RAM at idle when I tested it out! There is even a feature to remaster!

My interest came from all of the really old computers people give or throw away. I want to make these old machines useful again. SliTaz is the most brilliantly designed light distribution I have ever seen!

You can easily check out this one from the Live CD on just about any machine. SliTaz is really worth checking out!

[pbpersson]

I did find Mint more aesthetically pleasing for the most part though - Ubuntu does seem a bit chunky in comparison, but that's okay.


Just what exactly does it mean when a Linux Distro is "chunky"? :confused:

[rfruth]

Not heard of a distro referred to as chunky b4, but Mint is too heavy for me ...

[exploder]

I do not think that xarte meant anything disrespectful by that comment. Lets not get carried away here.:D

[COLiNx86]

You should try arch, although it may be 'too-hard' (Just read the beginners guide). Also foresight, sabayon, debian, and fedora.
But I personally recommend you try Arch and Foresight. Foresight is good because it's pretty easy to use and it's also a rolling release.

[mikeize]

I almost just installed Sabayon on my laptop, but after researching the package manager/update system I got scared off. Similarly, I'm wary of Arch because of the need to compile everything. For me, one of the most beautiful appeals/advantages of Ubuntu is the package management/debian system. Though rare, nothing is more frustrating than searching for a program only to find that there is no deb package for it! I know it only takes a couple of commands to compile it, but then why can't my system do it automatically? Also, sometimes a third party will make a deb package for such a program and give it to others--so I don't understand why the need to compile on individual systems.

[xarte]

chunky - I meant aesthetically in terms of visuals; Mint is very pretty. The artwork, interface and menus on Ubuntu are a little less elegant. Having said that, when I first arc'd it up I thought Ubuntu was the cleanest and most elegant desktop I'd seen since I first booted OSX. (three years and a gazillion downloads, installs and documents later, my Mac is anything -but- elegant. Working on correcting that though.)

Arch is definitely on the to-do list. Haven't heard of Sabayon. Isn't that french for Sauce or pudding or something?

I hope to get a new laptop soon which will be my working machine ( stable distro, actually get some data and workspaces going on it) and this one will be purely for playing. Well more eventually than soon :[

So far I've had pretty untidy results when attempting to compile stuff myself, so having it done for me at this point is a good thing. Once I get a bit more of a clue I should be okay with it.

OOH FORESIGHT looks nice !!! Might have to give it a whirl too. This is even harder than choosing an icecream flavour. Rum-n-Raisin or Choc Mint Chip?

I seem to be getting very Gnome-Centric. Am I missing something with KDE? and then theres XFCE and Fluxbox....

[jrusso2]

I don't think I realized that you were even gone.

Me either, he posted while gone.

[xarte]

Me either, he posted while gone.

er, yeah, I was just trying to be funny. Probably shouldn't, I can never tell jokes.

[ronnielsen1]

Slitaz is super fast but it didn't give me all of the apps I wanted so I continued shopping for debian based light weight distros. Here are some of them you could try.

AntiX
Dsl
Sidux

[mips]

Haven't heard of Sabayon. Isn't that french for Sauce or pudding or something?

Italian, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zabaglione

[ronnielsen1]

Haven't heard of Sabayon. Isn't that french for Sauce or pudding or something?

Definitely NOT lightweight

[Ripfox]

I don't think I realized that you were even gone.

HEYYYYY I was gone too man!! Didn't you miss ME??

[Ripfox]

Slitaz is super fast but it didn't give me all of the apps I wanted so I continued shopping for debian based light weight distros. Here are some of them you could try.

AntiX
Dsl
Sidux

Does Slitaz INSIST on making you use Ndiswrapper or what??

[C!oud]

I almost just installed Sabayon on my laptop, but after researching the package manager/update system I got scared off. Similarly, I'm wary of Arch because of the need to compile everything.

Arch's package manager pacman uses binary packages and does not compile everything. However you have the option of installing yaourt which will compile packages from the AUR repo. And Sabayon uses a binary package manager too in the form of Entropy. Although I'd be wary of world updates on sabayon too :wink:

[ronnielsen1]

Does Slitaz INSIST on making you use Ndiswrapper or what??
No, but unless you want to compile everything from source, it's packages are somewhat slimmer than debians

[albinootje]

I created a swap, root and home partition, and just now also resized the home partition to leave free space for tinkering with DSL/Puppy/LFS/whatever.


Did you try LFS ? If so, how did you like it ?
(Easier than Gentoo ? hehe :)

Also.. you try Arch Linux for sure.

And Slackware is a must (retro) to try, if only for the retro installation menu which looks about the same as in 1995! :) (Even Xv is still included in Slackware 12.2 I noticed)

Greeting to you ... Mr.Patrick "Slackware" Volkerding.
http://www.slackware.com/~volkerdi/

[cardinals_fan]

Does Slitaz INSIST on making you use Ndiswrapper or what??
Try linux-crypto, linux-wireless, and wireless_tools ;)
No, but unless you want to compile everything from source, it's packages are somewhat slimmer than debians
The SliTaz repos are growing very fast, but they are small at the moment.

[xarte]

Did you try LFS ? If so, how did you like it ?
(Easier than Gentoo ? hehe :)

Also.. you try Arch Linux for sure.

And Slackware is a must (retro) to try, if only for the retro installation menu which looks about the same as in 1995! :) (Even Xv is still included in Slackware 12.2 I noticed)

Greeting to you ... Mr.Patrick "Slackware" Volkerding.
http://www.slackware.com/~volkerdi/

I need to get a permanent-ish workable setup happening so I temporarily put Arch and Slack in the too-hard basket, but setting up a minimal install manually is quite appealing and definitely something I'll have a crack at.

LFS... yah.... that's more of a 'someday/maybe'. :)