[LUNI] Seen any good distros lately?

[Trev Peterson]

The distribution you choose depends on what your requirements are.
Below are some requirements and likely distributions that may meet your
needs:

Commercial/proprietary software that releases as only binary blobs then
you may be limited to Red Hat or SUSE as supported OSes.  This can be
apps, drivers (easier installation), or hardware tools such as raid
management software (Adaptec, Dell anyone).

For most fairly basic web/mail/network servers I recommend Debian Etch
for your server (normally Debian stable but Etch will go stable very
soon so it is probably your best bet).

For most standard (not a lot of very odd apps) desktops I recommend
ubuntu as it upgrades easy and is pretty polished.

If you need some apps that are "off the beaten path" and you are
somewhat technical or want to learn then Gentoo is a good choice.


Hope this helps.

	Trev

On Sun, 2007-01-07 at 15:04 -0700, Mike Scott wrote:
> I am considering changing Linux distros and wondered what your thoughts
> are.  I realize that this is a bit like asking which religion is best,
> but wanted to get some input.
> 
> I used to use Red Hat, but got tired of having to pay a subscription fee
> to easily recieve patches and updates.
> 
> I migrated to SuSe and have been happy for the most part with it's ease
> of installation as well as being able to handle my peripherals without
> having to go on an easter egg hunt for obscure drivers.
> 
> However, given SuSe's current "deal with the devil" (Microsoft), I can't
> in good concience continue to support them and ver 10.1 will be my last
> SuSe purchase..
> 
> I have basically three systems that I would like to run on and all three
> have different requirements, so a "one size fits all" approach may not
> be the way to go.  Since I try to pay for distros that I use
> (developers have to eat too), I have no problem paying for three
> distros.
> 
> I have a Sony VAIO laptop that I dual-boot between XP (a necessary evil)
> and Linux.  I need good support for the usual laptop hardware, including
> wireless.
> 
> Another is a P4 desktop system with nothing special, though I am
> considering buying a DVI video card for the LCD monitor I picked up
> last month, but will probably go with ATI on nVidia which seem to be
> widely supported.
> 
> Both of the above run GUIs (KDE) and are used for the usual stuff like
> word processing, email, web etc.
> 
> The third is a server which I want to use for ripping audio and video
> (though the audio will probably be ripped on the desktop box using
> ABCDE, and DVDs with whatever tool I get to work, since I didn't have
> room for a CD/DVD drive, but may install vid capture cards for MythTV)
> as well as general file storage.  There is no GUI installed on this
> system, but will probably look at something like IceCast and MythTV on
> this as well as the SlimServer to run my SqueezeBoxes.  This is a dual
> Xeon box (2.8G) with a 3Ware RAID card and 8, 250G SATA drives.
> 
> This also brings up another decision as to which filesystem is best for
> this. Since I will be dealing with small (FLAC) audio files, as well as
> large (MPEG) files, there are pros and cons to each (JFS, EXT3,
> ReiserFS).  Though that may be a separate thread altogether.
> 
> - Mike Scott
> 
-- 
Trev Peterson <trev at advanced-reality.com>
Advanced Reality