I have only tried two, Mandrake 7.0 and SuSE 7.0 and I really like SuSE. It is quite easy for a relative beginner like me to use. With their programs called Yast and Yast2 you can easily configure your xfree, cable modems, sound cards and other devices. It has a goodly amount of libraries too.
I’ll tack a rider to this post to say that System Commander is superior to Partition Magic. It can easily resize both windows and linux partitions without destroying the data as well functioning as a boot manager and various other capabilities.
Well, I’ve been wrestling* off and on with Linux for the past two years, and the best I’ve seen lately is Mandrake 7.2. Just this past weekend I installed it on the primary (/dev/hda) hard drive on my machine, and was quite impressed with its relative ease of setup and use. Now I just have to customize it a bit, and figure out wine so that I need not boot Win95** any more
Granted, I’ve not seen recent releases of any other distro, such as slackware, debian, or suse (which I’ve heard good things about).
IMHO Mandrake is great for the in-between user (not a pro, but not all that green either)
-9on
i.e. Waiting for a user-friendly version to come out, so that I don’t have to spend hours and hours just getting soundcards, ethernet cards, or modems to work! :eek:
** Ironically, I post this while using MSIE in Win95 :rolleyes:
We,the wife and I,use Red Hat. Runs on 3 servers here each doing different things. I also have it dual booting on my Win98 workstation.
I tried Mandrake about 6 months ago but it did not support some of hardware. Red Hat 7.0 even supports the newest server with the fancy Abit KT7-RAID motherboard.
BTW the wife is the main geek. I just learn what I can from her and try not to break anything when I’m fiddling on the servers.
I use Redhat. It’s what i started with and it still seems the best for a newbie like me. I’m not too technically oriented but like an OS that doesn’t go and crash because i decided i wanted to change a setting or play an mp3 or send an email or sit down. I’ve tried Mandrake, but couldn’t configure the thing to work with my system.
This is very interesting Coldfire, I hadn’t heard of Winlinux before. Have you heard much about it’s performance? I read this review here which doesn’t seem super positive yet.
I’m not quite sure what the benefits are, it doesn’t look like you can run both concurrently which to me would be the main reason I’d try something like that. Am I wrong? Besides, if you are actually running linux within a windows window, it would seem you are sacrificing the stability of linux plus I would think it’d be rather slow having both windows and a linux window manager running at the same time.
Some of the benefits that it advertises:
The ability to file share since they are both on the windows partition This is not really necessary because even though windows can’t usually access the linux partition on most distributions, linux has no problems accessing the windows partition. If you want data to be shared, you can just stick it in the windows partition.
The ease of installing winlinux Many of the distributions out there are now pretty easy to install. SuSE linux has a graphical installer that is pretty much the same as windows (you just have to keep clicking next and yes with only a few pieces of extra information to enter). Also if you get a program like system commander, creating partitions without destroying current data is a snap (but make sure you read the documentation first!). That review above says that installing winlinux isn’t too easy either.
9on I didn’t really like mandrake 7.0, I couldn’t get a lot of my devices working. I have heard 7.2 is pretty good, but the computer wizards I work with don’t like it because it doesn’t have a lot of the development libraries they want. I do mostly fortran programming right now so that’s not important, but I will be writing more C++ in the future. Also, don’t put too much faith in WINE, there are some applications that will work, but many others that won’t especially those that use directX (which unfortunately is a lot of good games).
I will look into RedHat in the future, it’s so hard to resist the urge to improve your system!
The main reason I went to linux was that I was getting really tired of all the crashes because I typically run over 5 applications at a time on my 366 celeron thinkpad. It works great in linux and I haven’t had a crash since I started using it. I even tried to kill it once by running about 20 intensive applications at once and it was still fine albeit a bit slow. Incidently, my favourite window manager is blackbox a quick, bare-bones system.
Right now I’m using what started out as Redhat 5.1 3 years ago, but now more closely resembles Redhat 6.2 than anything else (which isn’t saying much…). If I were to install Linux on a new machine though, I’d go with Debian. Its package management is head and shoulders above anything else (well, except the BSD ports collection), and it’s a generally well-thought-out distribution.
That said, there are a few things about it that piss me off. The installer is extremely obnoxious about package dependencies. I installed it once without X (on a headless machine that was to be a router), and it was like pulling teeth. And by default it installs some horrid botch of an editor as vi, which is evil and rude. Other than that it’s great.
Do not get me started on Debian package management.
I work for a company that does a subscription service for managing package dependencies on Linux computers. Part of it is a script that queries the computer to find out just what packages are installed. Even for something that simple, you have to jump through hoops in Debian. And to get all the details about a package, the dpkg command has to search a flat file. That can take about 15-20 seconds per package, which isn’t bad for a single user at a console but it’s kind of a drag when you’re scanning a whole system. And dpkg didn’t have details on some of the packages that it said were installed.
One week of evenings. There are some advantages to using a normal distribution :). I needed (need) to learn more about the Linux nitty-gritty but I felt overwhelmed with everything that comes with a typical distribution.
Now, I’m doing it again, building a firewall on an old 486. (The compiler keeps barfing back spurious seg faults, though, which I suspect is a hardware issue. I’m trying to nail that down at the moment.)
