[FRIAM] Distro, distro, .. which is best!

[Douglas Roberts]

I started with Slackware back in '92 or so, building it from 18 or so
floppies on an old NEC DX2-50 laptop.  Later, on a different laptop I
encountered a pcmcia cardbus driver bug in RH5.0, so I patched it & sent the
patch in, which ended up staying in the kernel for a while.  As a result I
was offered the early option on RedHat's IPO, which I kicked myself for not
jumping on at the time. I can't remember the details, but I believe RH
developers were given the option of buying in at ~$10 per share, and the
stock instantly jumped to $45 in the first few minutes of trading.  A couple
of months later it dropped back to ~$5, and so I felt better about the
missed opportunity. RH is trading at about $18 now.

Since then I've installed & worked with RedHat, CentOS (a RH 64-bit
recompile for AMD-64), Slackware, Knoppix, Helix (a forensic-specialized
version of Knoppix) , SuSe, and Mandrake.  I've pretty much settled on
Mandrake, mostly because it typically has better hardware support than the
other distros because it is updated more frequently, and because I like its
urpmi updater.  I do like the Debian-based Knoppix DVD live distro and
installer, but a couple of the packages I use (mplayer, for example) are not
as readily available for Debian as they are for Mandrake.  All told, I've
used Linux as my main desktop environment for about 12 years.

To satisfy the work-based Windows requirement I run VMWare & XP.  I like
having that little "x" button in the upper right-hand corner of the VMWare
Windows frame that I can click on whenever XP decides to misbehave.

--Doug

On 10/21/06, Alfredo <agbioinfo at gmx.net> wrote:
>
> Owen:
>
> - I have used KDE and GNOME. But KDE is the desktop I use most
> - I consider Mandrake 9.0 has been the best distro ever. The second one is
> Debian-31r0a-i386. I will give you a third and is Red Hat 6.2
> - I ran Mandrake and Debian on PC with a processor Duron of 850 Mhz with
> 256
> MB in ram memory and with a motherboard MSI. MSI Motherboard damage and I
> replaced it with a very cheap motherboard ASRock. Then I used a processor
> Intel 2.4 Ghz, Intel Motherboard and 512 MB in ram. I ran Red Hat on a
> 486,
> Sys Board and starting with 8 Mb in ram
>
> On Friday 20 October 2006 11:27 pm, Owen Densmore wrote:
> > OK, Doug has brought up a point I've wondered about.
> >
> > Friamers .. another question .. well three actually .. for you all:
> >    - Which Linux desktop distros have you used?
> >    - Which distro do/did you like best?
> >    - What hardware did you run it on?
> >
> > Years ago at Sun I was a RedHat + Gnome user .. indeed in 2000-2002,
> > it, on the Thinkpad hardware, had taken over SunLabs.  We even put it
> > in our JavaCar and found it worked with most of the weird drivers we
> > needed.
> >
> > It was a bit hard to get going on laptops, however.  Audio was quite
> > difficult, requiring rebuilding the kernel with new drivers, and
> > getting the Sleep function to work correctly was tough.  But all in
> > all, RedHat + Gnome + Thinkpad was quite successful.  Gnome was even
> > available on Solaris, so the interoperability was great between the
> > Sun servers and the laptops.
> >
> > So anyone else out there taken on the Linux desktop challenge?
> >
> >      -- Owen
> >
> > Owen Densmore   http://backspaces.net
> >
> > Begin forwarded message:
> > > From: "Douglas Roberts" <doug at parrot-farm.net>
> > > Date: October 20, 2006 6:26:33 AM MDT
> > > To: "The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group"
> > > <friam at redfish.com>
> > > Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Leopard vs. Vista
> > > Reply-To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
> > > <friam at redfish.com>
> > >
> > > Mandriva 2007 'la Ora' with KDE 3.5.4 (and a slew of whatever other
> > > packages you prefer)..
> > > http://www.mandriva.com/en/linux/2007
> > >
> > > On 10/20/06, fromm <fromm at vs.uni-kassel.de> wrote:
> > > What do you think is more impressive,
> > > advanced and useful, the new..
> > >
> > > ..Mac OS X Leopard with "Time Machine",
> > > "Spotlight" and "Ruby on Rails"..
> > > http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/index.html
> > >
> > > ..or the new Windows Vista
> > > with Aero, WPF and WCF ?
> > > http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/
> > >
> > > -J.
> > >
> > >
> > > ============================================================
> > > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> > > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> > > lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > --
> > > Doug Roberts, RTI International
> > > droberts at rti.org
> > > doug at parrot-farm.net
> > > 505-455-7333 - Office
> > > 505-670-8195 - Cell
> > > ============================================================
> > > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> > > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> > > lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
> >
> > ============================================================
> > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> > lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
>



-- 
Doug Roberts, RTI International
droberts at rti.org
doug at parrot-farm.net
505-455-7333 - Office
505-670-8195 - Cell
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