[SGVLUG] [Fwd: LINUX Distro]

[Claude Felizardo]

On 11/16/05, Don Saxton <dsaxton at pacbell.net> wrote:
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: DOREN GARCIA <doren42 at sbcglobal.net>
> To: Don Saxton <euphobot at pacbell.net>
> Date: Wed, 16 Nov 2005 15:13:25 -0800
> Subject: LINUX Distro
> I been thinking about getting a cheap used x86 box to play with.
>
> I've also been thinking about installing a LINUX distro. So far these seem
> to be the ones I'd be interested in.
>
> MEPIS Linux (Multimedia friendly) because I might want to be in the
> multimedia/digital living room business 3 years down the road.
>
>
> Debian GNU/Linux (all around stable & Server Friendly) because I eventually
> might want to set up a server eventually and Linux is cheaper than OSX.
>
>
> Mandriva Linux formerly Mandrake (Best Installers & Hardware detection)
> Because it seems like it might be the easiest with a partitioner etc.
>
> Got any opinions?

I don't know anything about MEPIS but as computer hardware and
software can change quite a lot in 3 years so I wouldn't assume that
MEPIS will be the most multimedia friendly distro then.

What kind of computer experience does this person have and how
detailed does he want to get?

If he's coming from a Windows background (I doubt there are too many
Mac users that would go for Linux on a desktop) and wants something
that will pretty much just work out of the box, has a GUI installer
and will work with most recent hardware, then I'd recommend
Mandrake/Mandriva.

If he's an old timer w/ experience with older computers and/or just
wants to pull up his sleeves and learn the ins and outs of Linux then
I'd recommend Debian or Fedora.

But what ever you do, do not try Linspire, especially if you have
leading edge hardware.  A friend of mine who is a long term windoze
user wanted to try Linux for the first time.  He made several
mistakes.

He downloaded a copy of Linspire and tried to install it for dual boot
on his primary desktop machine which normally runs winXP pro.  2nd
problem was that Linspire doesn't support booting off of RAID-0 (dual
SATA drives which require special windoze drivers to use the onboard
RAID controller).  He thought he'd be okay as he had a dedicated IDE
drive just for Linux.  Unfortunately something went wrong and he
wasn't able to boot windoze anymore.   In a panic, he uninstalled
Linspire but as it used GRUB, he was left with a boot loader that
couldn't find its config files (that's why I still use LILO).

While he had a backup of all his windows data, he hadn't run Ghost in
a while and didn't want to have to reinstall everything from scratch. 
He tried the windoze boot CD many times but it couldn't repair the
boot loader even after it said it did.  He still kept getting GRUB
error messages.  He installed windoze on the spare disk, tried various
3rd party utilities but nothing could excise grub from the RAID. 
After about a week, he needed to get the machine working again for his
wife so he ended up restoring from an old ghost image and having to
reinstall a bunch of applications.   Having been burned by Linux, he
said it might be a while before he's willing to try it again even
after I offered to go over there and help him install it on another
machine with a different distro.

Personally, I started with RedHat back around 4.2 but moved to
Mandrake years ago and have stuck with it even though I hate the new
name.  For the most part it just works with what ever I throw at it so
I can concentrate on other stuff.  The only thing I don't like is
having to go through RPM hell every time there's a major upgrade so I
usually go for fresh installs with a new release.  I'm currently
running Mandriva LE 2005 on my file/web server at home, my laptop and
at work.  I plan to try the new 2006 when I get a chance.


claude