Ok having used BSD (BSD/OS and FreeBSD) since '96, installed it on many machines both personal and production boxes I recently decided to upgrade my laptop which had been running FreeBSD 4.10 for a while to FreeBSD 5.3
as there is an app that I want to run that is better supported under FBSD 5.3.
Imagine my suprise when finding out that Xfree has been replaced with XOrg and is a bit trickier to install a window manager and X and takes up a hell of a lot more room. Now I’ll eventually sit down and hack around and get X installed but I thought ok, so lets try a Linux distro for the first time.
I dual boot the laptop between Win2000 and FBSD and have FBSD bootmgr installed to dual boot.
So looking around at some Linux distro’s I see Mandrake is at a minimum a 3 ISO d/l, Fedora is 3 or 4 ISO’s. Suse is one ISO but a bit behind. There is Debian and Slackware both a bit behind but both one ISO to d/l.
Which one are people using the most these days? My main issue is hardware support obviously. Laptop is an A21M Thinkpad. Running both a Prism2 based Netgear wireless card and a Dlink 670 ethernet card. Both cards work seamlessly on FreeBSD 4.10 and 5.3.
So any recommendation for a linux distro for a laptop?
I use Suse. I haven’t used linux on another machine so I can’t compare, but Suse works fine, but seeing as it’s put out my Novell, maybe it’s got more of a business networking purpose then a personal one.
UBUNTU!!! seriously it rocks, there was not 1 device I had to configure myself. Everything just worked from my usb devices to my wireless card tv out suspend everything! not to mention its an apt based distribution and apt rules. The only thing that I had to setup was mplayer because it doesnt come installed by default and getting the codecs which arnt included for legal reasons.
If you want it to just install everything you need for a desktop all you have to do is follow the prompts and choose the default options and your desktop will be automatically setup. There is also an “expert” mode if you want a more custom configuration. Ubuntu is only 1 cd and everything is automatically updated upon install.
“The best printer someone has ever used is the one on their desk right now” – Mike O’Neill
I’m sure Mike wasn’t this first person to say this, but I heard it from him, so he gets credit.
Replace the word printer with just about any piece of technology to make the quote relevant to the conversation.
I’ve used Fedora Core 1,2,3 and found it’s stability inconsistent. I only used Fedora for my MythTV box, and it runs pretty good right now, but it was a bitch to get it stable. When I use it for anything other than Myth, it gets pretty flaky. It might have something to do with the TV-Out though.
I have used Live disks of most of the software above, The differnence with Live cd is that you dont need to install on a computer it runs right off the disk for example I have used Knoppix http://www.knoppix.org/ it has over 2 gigs of sofware on a 700 meg disk. So if you want to make the shift to Linux or any of the above do a seach for live cd or live linux. the downloads are fast. good luck. I went back to mircosoft as the driver base is too huge. Linux is still a young and has a lot of growing before I seriously think about using it again. but thats just me…
[quote=“VMS”]Ok having used BSD (BSD/OS and FreeBSD) since '96, installed it on many machines both personal and production boxes I recently decided to upgrade my laptop which had been running FreeBSD 4.10 for a while to FreeBSD 5.3
as there is an app that I want to run that is better supported under FBSD 5.3.
Imagine my suprise when finding out that Xfree has been replaced with XOrg and is a bit trickier to install a window manager and X and takes up a hell of a lot more room. Now I’ll eventually sit down and hack around and get X installed but I thought ok, so lets try a Linux distro for the first time.
I dual boot the laptop between Win2000 and FBSD and have FBSD bootmgr installed to dual boot.
So looking around at some Linux distro’s I see Mandrake is at a minimum a 3 ISO d/l, Fedora is 3 or 4 ISO’s. Suse is one ISO but a bit behind. There is Debian and Slackware both a bit behind but both one ISO to d/l.
Which one are people using the most these days? My main issue is hardware support obviously. Laptop is an A21M Thinkpad. Running both a Prism2 based Netgear wireless card and a Dlink 670 ethernet card. Both cards work seamlessly on FreeBSD 4.10 and 5.3.
So any recommendation for a linux distro for a laptop?[/quote]
Yes I did try OpenBSD once a few years ago. It was ok, did what I needed but I had been using FreeBSD for so long I just stuck with FreeBSD.
But there are some new releases of software (on the wireless side of things) that use new header files and OpenBSD, nor older versions of FreeBSD do not have.
The software in question is developed under Linux so I thought I’d give one of those distros a try. So far SUSE doesnt do it for me. It installed but damned if it will let me center the screen properly. 10 different monitor configs with 10 different resolutions and screen sizes. Also I hate the way Linux is laid out. Maybe I’m just not used to it but programs and certain configs I always find in BSD, are located in some other place under SUSE, and I find that annoys me.
So I’m going to try UBUTU or whatever that one is called now.
If you want an Ubuntu distro (includes Live CD) send me a PM I have some left.
If you’re looking for ‘unbloated’ distros you could try gentoo, we installed it a on a couple servers. I just tossed Mandrake 10 off my machine, but I liked Fedora 2.
I’m a Fedora diehard. Tired a bunch of others, but I keep coming back to Red Hat since MiG turned me on to RH6 at school. The benefiet of using the most common distro is if you wanna download something, they most likely have it in .rpm format.
I’ve got Fedora 3.90 on my 686 and PPC 750 boxes. The release cycle for Fedora is very fast, so it’s great being able to try out the latest and greatest things now, rather than waiting 6 months for a new Debian to come out.
Maybe I’m lucky, but I’ve had excellent luck with my hardware. I can say with a straight face that “my computer (686) never crashes”. Even with X!
I used to run NetBSD on a collection of 680x0 machines. The differences between BSD style UNIX and AT&T SysV style UNIX (Linux) I found to be pretty bothersome too.
Well I was going to try another Linux distro but I decided to go read the Handbook for FBSD instead. When all else fails, RTFM.
So long story short, I have FBSD installed again and got KDE and XOrg running quite nicely now. It only took about an hour and a half, most of that time d/l’ing the KDE packages.
The apps I wanted to run compiled and run perfectly too. Might have to putz around with the sound stuff but I dont really care about that since I mostly run sound muted even in Windows.
I used to run NetBSD on a collection of 680x0 machines. The differences between BSD style UNIX and AT&T SysV style UNIX (Linux) I found to be pretty bothersome too.[/quote]
I had NetBSD running on a Sun 3/60 once, and had another 3/60 netbooting from that. I had SunOS 4.0.1 running for a while on them too. That was interesting to get working. Had to boot from tape then install SunOS from tape. Nothing like having 2 big sun 19" monitors and assorted gear in my basement. Lots of cables…
