Thinkpads Forum

I do not know which one to use ?, Redhat, Mandrake, Suse, etc. , please your feedback, thanks

brosen wrote:I do not know which one to use ?, Redhat, Mandrake, Suse, etc. , please your feedback, thanks

I have not yet installed Linux on my T43, but plan to use Gentoo, because that's what all my other computers use.

Do you have Linux experience? If so, I would suggest going with the distro with which you are most familiar.

If you don't have any Linux experience, I would then ask you what your goals are. Do you just want it to use a specific program? Then go with something targeted at the "ease of use" market, like Ubuntu, Suse or Fedora Core.

If you really want to learn what's going on "under the hood", and take a much more active, "hands on approach" to setting up and tuning your Linux system, I'd go with Gentoo or Debian.

Disclaimer: I've only used Gentoo (and OpenBSD) for the last few years. Before that, Debian. And almost a decade ago, Slackware. Definately check out DistroWatch for help on picking the right distribution.

brosen wrote:I do not know which one to use ?, Redhat, Mandrake, Suse, etc. , please your feedback, thanks

I have a 2623-DDU on which I have tried 3 different distributions (well, actually 2 different distros since one is a variant of the other):
SuSE 10.1
Kubunutu 6.06
Ubuntu 6.06

I liked them all but ended up keeping SuSE as I find it to be the easiest to configure. I had trouble in one or both of the K/U-buntu versions getting the wireless to work .. I don't really recall at the moment. I have also installed the ATI commercial display drivers, which work very well. Here is where the nod goes to ubuntu as they are trivial to install under that distro. (although they are not that difficult under SuSE if you have even a little bit of linux knowledge).

As much as I prefer Gentoo, Slackware, etc, I tend to run Ubuntu on laptops because of its excellent out-of-the-box hardware compadibility.