What's the best distro for ME?

[porkfat]

Hello,

I'm in the process of wiping my T41 of all its preloaded software so I can do a clean install of XP. I'm also thinking of a partition for Linux, sooo...

My question is: In your opinion, which Linux distro should I go with for a dual-boot, given the following factors?

-I'm new to Linux, but am currently learning some UNIX basics in my computational chem lab.
-Ultimately, I want to become more proficient with UNIX for future research purposes and with Linux for personal, everyday use (ready to ditch M$ for good, except for running games).
-I've considered taking the time to install Gentoo from source, only because I hear it's a very good way to learn the inner-workings of Linux. (However, the thought of somehow rendering my laptop inoperable in that process is a bit scary...) That is to say, time is not really an issue assuming I can rely on a Win XP boot for work.
-Driver support for my T41 (2379-XX5, refurb) hardware.
-Don't necessarily want all the bells and whistles available in a distro package, again, assuming I have XP. Space on my 40GB HD is valuable.
-I don't have much experience working with command-line (been a looong time since I've gone into MS-DOS for anything...)
-Linux from Scratch seems a bit too much
-I plan to get a Mac laptop within the next couple of years. I believe Mac OSX is now built on FreeBSD (?), so I plan on playing with that UNIX later.

I suppose my priorities are to learn Linux and wean myself from relying on a windows (point and click) environment. I have access to multiple other computers should something go wrong, however this T41 is my everyday computer and the only one *I* actually own. (Actually, I considered putting a small distro on my GF's old Gateway2000 Solo2300. It would have to be Debian [censored] Small though, since it's 233 MHz with 2.1 gig HD and 32 MB RAM ...)

Anyway, any suggestions would be appreciated!

[egibbs]

Well, Ubuntu seems to work best right out of the box on TPs.

But if you want this to be a learning experience, consider Slackware. From what I've heard it's a steeper learning curve because all configuration is done by editing config files rather than with GUI tools, but you will learn Linux inside out. Their claim to fame is that if a Linux user is stuck with an issue, they go find a Slackware user to tell them how to fix it.

Note that you don't need to compile it from scratch - you can download a disk image that will get you up and running. But once you are in you will have no choice but to learn the innards.

As far as dual booting - whatever you do be sure you have a good backup of your Windows partition before you start.

Ed Gibbs

[djpharoah]

i would recommend Ubuntu since your new to linux. and it just works out of the box.

if your going to be taking linux seriously and wanting to totally customize it..try out gentoo linux.

-dj

[christopher_wolf]

I would recommend Ubuntu as well for now since it works out of the box on just about all Thinkpads. OS X is built on top of FreeBSD as well (BSD is an *excellent* OS, being very stable I would use it for servers or big computing applications). ThinkWiki ( www.thinkwiki.org ) is an excellent source for Linux on Thinkpads as well. After you feel very comfortable with Ubuntu, you can try out some other stuff like BSD or other LinuxDistros, etc. You can also get a 2nd HDD adapter + HDD and put it in the Ultrabay if you don't want to make a single-HDD dual boot system.

[Kyocera]

I have had Xandros running on one of the HD's on my T30 for a while now, it installed easily found all hardware including the wireless card, I was shocked at how easy it was.

[mfratt]

Ubuntu is your best bet. It has everything a noob wants and is still good enough for a more advanced user. Shy away from Gentoo for your first try (Dont learn to drive by throwing yourself in the seat of an F1 car). And OSX is FreeBSD in its core, but the user front has practically nothing UNIX to it. I hear RedHat is working on a distro specifically for the MacBook Pro, as I assume thats what you would get.

[Sudevan]

I have a question ( now that I have been away for some time from this group! ). I had tried various versions of Linux on 600 and 600E TPs and in all cases, I had trouble getting the sound to work -- a common problem, I discovered, with 600s and 600Es. Does Ubuntu get around this difficulty?

Sudevan

[tfflivemb2]

Did you try the disks for Red Hat 9.0 that I sent you?

The solution for getting the sound to work can be found here, although, it might work on any flavor of linux:

http://www.redhat.com/archives/sound-li ... 00057.html

[djpharoah]

Did you try the disks for Red Hat 9.0 that I sent you?

The solution for getting the sound to work can be found here, although, it might work on any flavor of linux:

http://www.redhat.com/archives/sound-li ... 00057.html

are you serious? RH9 is a very old distro. there are many newer ones out now that are much easier to use and come with much more hardware recognition software.

If you want to stick with RH try the Fedora Core Project. I have heard that they are good at what they do. dont know personally as i use gentoo linux.

-dj

[Kyocera]

I bought Red Hat 9 about 2 yrs ago at Staples (the full set) for around $80. For someone to give it away free is pretty thoughtful.

[h2]

porkfat, give kanotix a try. It's a straight debian sid based distro, it's not a pseudo fork like ubuntu, very nice stuff, very easy to install. I just installed it on a T41 and it works perfectly out of the box, no tweaking needed unless you want to. Haven't yet tested the wireless so I can't say for sure, but usually kano's scripts handle these types of setups very well.

Although I left XP on it just to be on the safe side, I don't need to use it since I have everything working on the kanotix partition.

Hint on the install: use gparted livecd to partition the drive, it works very well. I'd recommend giving xp 8 gigs, kanotix swap 1/2 a gig, kanotix / 8 gigs, and the rest I'd setup as fat32, I put my /home on that if I remember right, so xp and kanotix can share data easily. I did that before I realized how well it would work, I'm probably going to shrink xp way down in the future, to 4 or 5 gigs, and give all the rest of the space to kanotix and its data partitions.

Oh, by the way, nice forum guys, I was looking for a new 9 cell lithium battery and I stumbled on this site, found a link to an ebay guy who's selling oem 9 cells for $65, just ordered one, perfect, saved my $100, I appreciate it.

[porkfat]

Thanks for the feedback!

mfratt, you're quite right that the Mac OSX front end isn't UNIX-like. I've been fooling with the terminal, x11 and Fink to learn commands and do some stuff on my girlfriend's iBook though. Very cool to hear about the MacBook RH release

I've played with the latest releases of Knoppix and Ubuntu Live CDs (both seem great), although not to an extent to notice differences between the GNOME and KDE environments. Anyone have a particular preference between GNOME and KDE, and why? A coworker in my lab also highly recommended Fedora Core 4 so I downloaded the DVD .iso for that with torrent. Heard good things about Debian, so Kanotix looks good as well. So many to choose from... I suppose I need to just pick one and go with it for a full install.

Now to tackle the dual-boot issue. I'm having 2nd thoughts about putting this on my only HD with XP, admittedly because I'm a total noob when it comes to this stuff. My coworker mentioned the possibilty that if my Linux partition somehow fails, I won't be able to access XP either? I need to do some more research on it all (bootloaders, etc), just haven't had the time, but I don't wanna screw this up. I have Partition Magic, so I'm hoping that makes things a bit simpler.

[FuguTabetai]

I've played with the latest releases of Knoppix and Ubuntu Live CDs (both seem great), although not to an extent to notice differences between the GNOME and KDE environments. Anyone have a particular preference between GNOME and KDE, and why?

That's a religious war there, and likely to incite flames. Personally I like Gnome because the first time I ran KDE (under a Knoppix livecd) it looked very busy and cartoonish to me. Gnome has less moving parts and flash, and is less distracting to me.

KDE's kioslaves are totally awesome though. I wish Gnome had a transparent pluggable file-system layer (I think gnome-vfs is trying to get there, but kioslaves lets you transparently write / read files over a ssh connection and apps don't need to know a thing about it.)

A coworker in my lab also highly recommended Fedora Core 4 so I downloaded the DVD .iso for that with torrent. Heard good things about Debian, so Kanotix looks good as well. So many to choose from... I suppose I need to just pick one and go with it for a full install.

I'm running Fedora Core 4 on a ThinkPad A31 and really like it. It did a good job of detecting my hardware (even works with my PCMCIA wireless card and PCMCIA Firewire / USB2 card.) If you want to listen to MP3s and watch videos you will need to install extra codecs though. It is pretty easy to do by adding an extra repository to yum though. There should be plenty of notes on the web about that (there was when I set up my machine.)

I did have trouble getting Japanese text input set up while keeping menus in English, but once I got that set up, things have been great.

Now to tackle the dual-boot issue. I'm having 2nd thoughts about putting this on my only HD with XP, admittedly because I'm a total noob when it comes to this stuff. My coworker mentioned the possibilty that if my Linux partition somehow fails, I won't be able to access XP either? I need to do some more research on it all (bootloaders, etc), just haven't had the time, but I don't wanna screw this up. I have Partition Magic, so I'm hoping that makes things a bit simpler.

I haven't run Windows for a few years, but I've always been able to boot into the XP partition when I've needed it. Early Fedora Core (2 and 3 I think) had a problem where they could wipe out your Master Boot Record and then you would lose your XP partition (recoverable with some hand editing though.) That isn't the case with newer releases though - they fixed that bug.

Be sure to install Windows first. Windows likes to blow away linux partitions if you already have that installed.

[carbon_unit]

I think the key is to identify which distros have hardware detection that works well with your current hardware and its hardware interactions. This is easier to identify with pre-built computer (Thinkpads) than with custom made computers since different users will have similar experiences with the same equipment while the same user will have different experiences with different equipment.
Once you find which distros like your hardware you will be narrowed down to a few to choose from. At this point it is a personal preference decision based on Gnome/KDE/other desktop environment and included apps.
Personally I run Xandros because it works well on Thinkpads, supports my BG2200 wireless card with WPA right out of the box, SAMBA network browsing works immediately and overall Xandros requires very little customizing (tweaking) before I am ready to use it.
YMMV.

[teetee]

Well, Ubuntu seems to work best right out of the box on TPs.

But if you want this to be a learning experience, consider Slackware. From what I've heard it's a steeper learning curve because all configuration is done by editing config files rather than with GUI tools, but you will learn Linux inside out. Their claim to fame is that if a Linux user is stuck with an issue, they go find a Slackware user to tell them how to fix it.

Note that you don't need to compile it from scratch - you can download a disk image that will get you up and running. But once you are in you will have no choice but to learn the innards.

As far as dual booting - whatever you do be sure you have a good backup of your Windows partition before you start.

Ed Gibbs

I am second to choosing slackware. If someone asked me how to configure sound in linux. I will first use #lspci -v to find out what the chip is and then go to http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/ and try to find the installation steps. Except for those special/obsolet/proprietary sound cards such as usb audio dongle or modem/WDM/non-pnp sound driver, I am confident to setup the rest of the audio in any linux distro on any x86 computer.

In my opinion, Slackware is not difficult to learn but it is the better way to learn linux. It's so simple and so following POSIX standards so you can't miss out any thing while donig the trouble shooting. Yes It does come with package management system (.tgz package and .rpm db) and the upgrad/update script is also available. You can totally focus on the things that you are trying to setup instead of fuzzing around the interface/distro-oriented problems.

My definition of a good distro is the distro that fits all my needs and gets things done. By using slackware, however, I not only get things done but also I feel I learn how things work better.

Slackware comes with all major window managers (twm, fvwm, xfce4, KDE). Gnome/GnomeGTK+ has been removed from the latest slackware but the gnome-slackware community has provided lots of support so it's not a problem. I currently use XFCE4+ROX locally and fvwm remotely on my celeron 300MHz thinkpad without any problems.

Reference:
1. slackware@wiki
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slackware
2. slackware package website
http://linuxpackages.net/
3. slapt-get (debian APT-like package update script)
http://directory.fsf.org/slapt-get.html
4. slackupdate script
http://www.darklinux.net/slackupdate/
5. slackware current changlog (reasons for why gnome is not in the official release anymore)
http://www.slackware.com/changelog/i386 ... stable.txt
6. for gnome users
http://gsb.sf.net
http://gware.sf.net
7. file managers memory usage test
http://thunar.xfce.org/wiki/memory_usage
8. Understanding memory usage on Linux
http://virtualthreads.blogspot.com/2006 ... linux.html
9. ROX
http://rox.sourceforge.net

teetee

[benplaut]

my vote goes to Ubuntu. It's easy to get started with, but leaves plenty of room to grow.

From my semi-biased standpoint (i use neither), KDE is a nice DE if you want the flash and bang, but it slower and not as stable as gnome. Gnome can look and feel very, very good if you do a bit of tweaking.

My vote goes to gnome, but the best way is to try both, and see what you like

[jogego]

I'd recommend using a Live CD/DVD to see which distro works with your setup, having gone thru so many sleepless nights trying to get sound on an old 600E, this is not a joke. Most wireless cards will work with Ndiswrapper.

Kanotix has been mentioned and I cannot overpraise this distro. In my view its a really underrated distro. Kano has done a very good job on it and the forum is quite lively. You are likely to get Kano himself trying to sort out your issues.

SimplyMepis is another very wonderful distro and it also has a very wonderul forum with members ready to help you out.

Being a KDE man myself, I sincerely prefer Kubuntu but having said that, some programs come with Ubuntu which I find essential so I just install Ubuntu first and then change it to Kubuntu.

These three distros come with Live Cds for Mepis and Kanotix, the Live CD is also the install CD.

Suse 10 or Opensuse is also a very capable distro and my only grouse with it is the installation time where Kanotix o mepis takes me 30 mins, suse takes an hour and a half but then its also a very wonderful distro.

They all have their peculiarities and try them and see what you want and what suits you personally.

[porkfat]

Probably haven't noticed my more recent post in the General TP forum, but my dilemma in choosing a distro was overshadowed by greater concerns after a recent little accident with the computer. A glass of water was involved...

[jogego]

Ouch!!!

[BruisedQuasar]

Several major Linux distros made a major leap forward over the past year in Live CD versions that are impressive in their capacity to auto detect and auto load a Linux system

I recently ordered 16 Live CDs from budgetcds... This group makes high quality copies of any Linux distro you order for a small fee, less than $2 a CD. If you order at least $25 worth, S\H is free. The downloading and burning is done by members in France. It takes about a week to get them.

I just finished trying all the live CDs in a Dell Optiplex, a Dell Dimension and a Thinkpad T23. My favorite so far is the newest Live CD release of Ubuntu. It auto detected my Broadband Internet connection, comes with Firefox 1.5 and OpenOffice 2.0... It correctly auto detected my audio & display cards and all of my peripherals, even my HP three- in-one PSC 1310 printer.

I had Internet, CD & DVD burner, floppy drive, external Hard Disk, Lexar pen drive, etc right off. Get this. These Live CDs allow me to benefit from the high speed of my Dell installed CDROM players for the first time. Most of the Live CDs have me up and running (especially [censored] Small Linux, Puppy 1.0.4, , Slax Kill Bill 5.06, & the Japanese tweak, Accelerated Knoppix) sooner than my installed Windows XP Pro can cold boot!

Most of the new Live CDs are installable and they include Firefox, Mozilla, or Conquerer links to the website where you can get online manuals and updates.

I am seriously impressed at the progress made in just 12 months (the last time I ordered live CDs and tested them). I am impressed and impressing me is hard to do.

PC media Gerus say recent Google and Yahoo developments have Gates looking over his shoulder for the first time. They haven't taken a look at the newest lot of Linux Live CDs !

[wpwood3]

My favorite for speed and ease of use is Vector Linux.

It is easy to install and VERY FAST! It's based on Slackware but has great install and configuration tools. The SOHO edition is a free download and includes KDE and OpenOffice.

[lfeagan]

My vote goes for SuSE 10.0. It is a very nice distro and has a ton of packages available for it. RedHat/Fedora as a distro always annoys me as over the years it has continually branched more and more into using their own config files to generates the files in /etc instead of writing programs that interpret the /etc files and thereby still allowing you to modify them. The VectorLinux SOHO distro is good for getting a super bare-bones but very speedy install. The Linux distro I am most looking forward to is the next release of Novell Enterprise Linux. It should be the answer to many admins prayers. Finally Linux will have a large supplier having a complete management solution integrated with Novell ZEN.

Lance