Linux Users- Which Distro Do You Use??

Which Linux distro do yuou at the moment??

  • Red Hat

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Fedora Core

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Gentoo

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Mandrake

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Debian

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Suse

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Slackware

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Knoppix

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Other....

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Total voters
    0

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seeing as though a significant numbers of GP32x'ers use Linux, or at least dual-boot, I was wondering what the most common distro's we use are........

I'm currently using RH9 but am looking to change in the next week or so.
 
Gentoo :D

And I'm going to install whatever distro can actually detect my laptop's HW first. The problem is mostly the Wi-Fi (PCMIA) card, all the live CD's say that they don't recognise it. If I could just find out how to put a driver on to a live CD (I've found the right driver, need to put it on), I will be able to get on the internet, and do an install from there.
 
I have to vote other, as I am using:
Red Hat 8 & 9, Debian, Mandrake, & Sentinix on differing production machines...
Lindows on a testbed..

Mandrake seems to be the best desktop OS.

Still not sure which is the best Server.. Sentinix is VERY good for Network Monitoring, etc.. (which it is designed for)..

The others just got installed depending on what I was feeling like at the time...


Just make sure you install Webmin on all of them, and it starts to matter less which Distro you are using!!

Argon0
 
divadsci posted on May 29 2004 at 09:23 AM said:
Are there any distros as simple as mandrake but require less power/ram ?

400mhz with 64MBs of RAM seems to be really quite slow
It all depends on optimisations, with a distro like gentoo, you can compile everything from source, specific to your hardware with your choice of optimisation flags.

Although 64 MB RAM is kinda low, is your swap set to a decent amount? (atleast double your ram, but 512 is a good number even with 64 MB RAM)

Remember like any os, if you load too much crap, it will get slower and slower.

Dont go for the all out eye candy, thats going to be hell on a slower PC. There are performance settings in each window manger, and even slimer faster window managers to try also.

Most newer distros are designed for standard PCs (700mhz+, 128MB+ ram, video accelerator), but that is just because they come setup for newer PCs. That doesnt mean you cant easily set them up for older pcs however. It just takes a bit of doing.
 
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I'll have a bit of a harder look at all the settings then.

Also I'm have a problem running xmms. It can't find the font (-adobe-helvetica-bold-r-*-*-10-*) it needs for the playlist, and I jave know idea where I'll be able to find it.

*edit: found out how to use it without the playlist, but i would still like a playlist :)
 
Gentoo is much lighter on RAM than XP. I strictly made sure no spyware or anything I didn't like came onto XP, but it used 75~80% ram (I have 512MB), and 100MB swap (just plain dumb, that extra 100MB would also fit in the RAM). Gentoo uses 64 (nothing running) - 250 (loads and loads of stuff running). Ang none of my gig of swap :D
 
Does Mandrake partition the hard drive for you or do you have to do it beforehand?
Mandrake's installer does have partitioning tools built in, but beware, they didn't go too smoothly for me. Their "non-destructive" resizing of my NTFS partition left windows unable to boot any more. Luckily the data was fine, but it was a little bit annoying having to reinstall it when I shouldn't have had to. None of the standard ways of repairing a problem like that worked, so reinstalling was all I could do.
 
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Does Mandrake partition the hard drive for you or do you have to do it beforehand?
Mandrake's installer does have partitioning tools built in, but beware, they didn't go too smoothly for me. Their "non-destructive" resizing of my NTFS partition left windows unable to boot any more. Luckily the data was fine, but it was a little bit annoying having to reinstall it when I shouldn't have had to. None of the standard ways of repairing a problem like that worked, so reinstalling was all I could do.

Since reinstalling your OS, fixed the problem and you didnt have data loss, that means that nothing was changed or 'broken' the installer simply didnt write windows into your bootloader, it would only take about 15 seconds to do so manually.

Assuming windows was on hda1 (first harddrive, first partition) and you use GRUB all you would have to do is add:

title=Windows
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1

to your /boot/grub/grub.conf

Similar but slightly different syntax and a different file if you use LILO (and change hd0,0 to whatever harddrive and parition windows is using). Normally the installs will auto detect the OS's already on and add their entries to the bootloader, but if it didnt for some reason, its, very simple, to fix. :) And there are many utilities that you can use to auto populate your bootloader. All it entails is editing a simple settings file to let your bootloader know where to look for windows during boot. A reinstall of your OS is not needed.
 
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Not the case Akuma, I know how to manually edit the bootloader and when pointed towards my Windows partition, it would try to boot, but restart instead. There was nothing I could do to make windows boot.
 
Oh well, never trust ANY application that resizes your paritions and "preserves" the data. On any OS. I have had nothing but trouble with them.

Although I installed Mandrake 10, twice yesterday for someone, and it went flawlessly both times. There might be other factors here, like harddrive type and brand, and what was used originally to parition it, bios, etc..
 
Yeah, you are probably right.. I beleive it is to do with the fact that it is a laptop and it has a "branded" bios with minimal settings. I used to use a program called BootIt NG to resize partitions, and this is a truly excellent program, however my harddrive died last year and I replaced it with another. BootIt NG no longer even sees my drive. This probably has something to do with the type of harddisk being "hardcoded" into the bios or something. I really don't know the specifics, but I reckon that they are related problems. If there is one thing that will put a spanner in the works of a Linux installation, its a laptop :)
 
I downloaded Gentoo the other day. Will it sit pretty with Win XP or am I going to have "fun and games"? Come to mention it is there any distro that works trouble free with Win XP.

My ideal setup would be dual boot Linux and Win XP. Should I just install Linux then XP or the other way around?

Last time I tried Linux was Suse 7 - and it wasnt the great leap I was expecting.
 
If you have another partition, I dunno how easy/hard (no matter what I do, LILO won't load Windows, and I haven't tried GRUB, since that wouldn't load linux). If you have anohter HD (like me), it's really easy (the part getting it working with windows I mean, not the overall installation ;)). All you do is install Gentoo on your 2nd HD, then you can use the BIOS 1st boot setting to change boot from XP or Linux. I :wub: Linux so much that when I get time, I'm moving it to my big HD, and Windows can get the small one. And if I ever finish these online courses that only work with windows (I have to do them for homeschooling), windows is going away :p
 
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