everyday internetwork ecology

Adam’s GNU/Linux Distro Page

About GNU/Linux

First of all, I want to acknowledge and endorse the use of the full name for the operating system which is GNU/Linux. If you want to know more about this then check out an article about it on the FSF’s website, or have a read of Richard M. Stallman’s collection of essays on the topic entitled “Free Software, Free Society” (2002) – (which you can get from the fsf website).   As for where I weigh in with the whole naming issue, I take a somewhat middle approach.   If an OS has only free software then you should put GNU/Linux in its official name.   I wonder if RMS would like it if you called the OS GNU/Linux even when it has proprietary software in it?

GNU/Linux Distributions

update: june 2009

I am running Ubuntu Netbook Remix (9.04) now on my eeepc.    I use GNOME mostly, but also have fluxbox installed there as well for a no-distractions desktop if I want to just write.

On my desktop computer I have Mepis 8.0 with its default KDE 3.5.10, and fluxbox and XFCE.  so far XFCE seems to be the desktop I spend the most time in.  it is somewhere between fluxbox and kde.  functionality vs simplicity.

On my other notebook I have windows xp and opensuse 10.3 still.  haven’t been arsed updating either as they serve my purposes just fine.

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There’s a nice page at wikipedia on free software which is a useful place to start.

I currently run OpenSUSE on my university desktop computer (11.1 with KDE 4.1)  and also my Acer notebook (10.3 with KDE 3.5.7).

I have Ubuntu EEE (now called EasyPeasy) on my EEEPC 1000HD (8.04 with GNOME). Not really into the default layout of it, or Ubuntu/GNOME as a general rule, but it is functional and has served me for the last four months (with only one reinstall in the first week of use when I broke GNOME with my tinkering).

On my desktop computer I run Sabayon 4 (which installs KDE, GNOME, Xfce, and some other minimal desktops as well).   I like to run FluxBox on that machine as I use it mainly for writing and working on my PhD.   FluxBox is responsive with no clutter.    Sabayon’s DVD installer puts on a LOT of software by default. More than you will likely need.  You can trim some of the software away when you install.   My one gripe with sabayon is that there is no intuitive Settings Manager gui as in OpenSUSE and Ubuntu.   I guess that’s not so bad, because I’m okay with editing the xorg.conf or whatever.   I have just grown lazy over the years of using the distros with settings wizards.     I would even consider putting his distro on my EEEPC.       The media centre software on here is very good also.

The 2009 version of Mandriva is not bad.  Very slick.  My major problem with it was trying to add software to it from the package manager.  Fail!   Don’t tell me there are dependency issues and then tell me I cannot install the required software when I try to resolve those issues, because the software needed cannot be installed because it, in turn, needs software that cannot be installed … etc.  Epic. Fricken. Fail.   Moving to another distro?   Fo’ sho’.

I tried Linux Mint and it’s very nice. I accidentally downloaded the “free software only” edition which was a bit useless as it came with no video/audio codec support.  I know that’s kinda normal in some distros.  But in OpenSUSE and Sabayon it just has all the stuff you want out of the box.  Mint looked clean tho.  Nice GNOME implementation.

For the low end hardware I have been following Puppy linux which is nice, but a bit too rough around the edges for me at the moment.   I have become accustomed to the gloss of the major distros.    There’s a spin of puppy called DCL (don’t think it’s updated to the newest puppy as of this writing).

I have also been dipping my toe into the darker waters -  over in BSD land!    Not sure why I’d switch.  Seems different enough that I’d have to actually pay attention.    I’ve tried test-installing it on a VBox virtual machine to see how it goes.   So far it’s ok.   DesktopBSD got to a display manager, where regular freebsd just borked a few times and had some xorg issues which just made me cranky enough to delete the virtual hdd.

And who can forget my old friends @ amiga forever?!?   AmigaOS is awesome.  It’s not linux but their KX Light is UAE running on Knoppix which is awesome.   You can google that if you’re keen.  Or see my amiga page.

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Older Comments about Linux circa 2007.   Kept here for posterity.  Some of the comments still apply, unless I’ve added something new in the section above.

My choice after SUSE for a desktop OS would have to be MEPIS, which is a fast little LiveCD distro that is quick to load up and has really good hardware detection… and is also quick to install if you decide you want to put it on your computer permanently. MEPIS is based on Ubuntu (see below), and possibly in the future back to Debian…  which makes it a convenient way of getting the slick-ness of Ubuntu with some other nice touches from the MEPIS team, including a KDE desktop instead of Ubuntu’s GNOME.

Another good choice that I have come across in the last couple of months is PClinuxOS which seems to be a very solid and reliable contender for the coveted crown that Ubuntu has at the moment. This one is based on Mandriva (formerly Mandrake), another WindowsXP look-alike. I put this on my notebook for a while but it didn’t play nicely with my video card, so I replaced it with SUSE when 10.3 came out.

I feel like I should mention Ubuntu since it’s really popular at the moment. I have tried it in various forms since the Breezy Badger version, but the liveCD always takes forever to load up on both of my computers. I installed it and used it for a short while but there is something about it that just hasn’t clicked for me personally. It comes with the gnome desktop by default, but there is a KDE version (called Kubuntu, funnily enough). I haven’t used the KDE version. That said, this is a good choice if you are not a computer novice but you’re curious about GNU/Linux. There’s plenty of support on the internet for ubuntu due to it’s popularity. Also Xubuntu with a nice XFCE desktop.

I like what Knoppix has become as a liveCD, especially with the Beryl faux-3D desktop which is very slick indeed (but probably meaningless as all the major distros have beryl/compiz/metisse). This is a distro that has a lot going for it if you need a portable system. Like many livecd distros you can use a USB stick to store a profile with system settings or files that you work on. Pretty handy.

I quite liked the recent Mandriva liveCD with it’s new pseudo-3D desktop compositing environment called Metisse. The window scheme from metisse was really nice (it’s called La Ora I believe), and I wonder if you can get something like it for KDE? I haven’t used it a lot but I like the possibilities that the new desktop offers.

As far as other distros go, there’s a few specialty kind of ones around.

There’s a couple of “security / penetration testing” distros that I have tried, with mixed results: one called Backtrack which had a clean presentation and a nice range of apps, and another one called STD-Knoppix (I think it had fluxbox as its window manager) that I got an early version of so it seemed a bit less impressive than Backtrack. Neither of them liked my wireless card in my notebook which stopped me from using either of them in any depth. How else am I supposed to use them to “test” wireless network connectivity (in my home, I mean)?

Damn Small Linux is a neat distro with a really small footprint so it takes up hardly any room on a mini-CD – or alternatively on a USB drive which you can load it from. I have a version of it that runs inside a little emulator window so you can run it over the top of windows if you need it for some reason (I’m not sure if that one is still available). The software on it is not the latest sort of resource hog technology, but it is very useable in terms of what is included.

Another distro that I quite liked was a multi-media-based one called Dynebolic. I used v1.4.1 and it had a really nice selection of software that you could use if you needed a production environment on the go that could run on different hardware, and didn’t always have the resources to take a portable computer with you. Included in this particular distro was a

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blah blah. back in the mid 90s we used to put “under construction” animated GIFs around pages like this. huzzah!

maybe i’ll make this next bit a separate page altogether.. we’ll see..
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Repos
http://software.opensuse.org/download/mozilla/openSUSE_10.2/

http://download.videolan.org/pub/vlc/SuSE/10.2

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http://mirror.griffith.edu.au/linux/packman/suse/10.2/

http://mirror.griffith.edu.au/linux/suse10.2/repo/oss/

http://mirror.pacific.net.au/linux/packman/suse/10.2/

http://software.opensuse.org/download/OpenOffice.org/openSUSE_10.2/

http://www.linuxclues.com/articles/01.htm- md5sum -

to install freemind – http://chintanrajyaguru.com/blog/tech/installing-freemind-on-suse-linux-10.2.html

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