What distro are you trying right now? - Page 109

joe.pelayo · #**1621** 5th June 2010, 01:25 AM

Yesterday I installed F13 x84_64 in my laptop and couldn't have had a stranger experience. Of course I knew what I had to expect because I've been using F13 i686 in another machine: the x86_64 installation went smooth and the system is very pretty and responsive.

However, there was some point yesterday when it seemed the machine was alive and playing with me: first I tried to get it to suspend by closing the lid (something I am used to do from the F12 days) and to my great horror it seemed the function was not supported anymore! (it hung with the X server apparently dying) I am pretty sure I had already rebooted it from the time I installed the mesa-dri-experimental drivers.

Anyway, I had to hard reboot the machine. The next time I tried to suspend the machine it apparently worked (it resumed as expected) except for the fact that the wireless seemed to have been killed.

I shut down the machine and went ahead with my business until I used it again (picked a wireless network) and for my great surprise this time suspend worked without apparent issue! It seemed as if the machine read in my mind that I was thinking of downgrading to F12...

Thanks,
Joe.

xuniltoor · #**1622** 5th June 2010, 02:10 AM

Been playing with salix all day. Would recommend if your too lazy or not comfortable with slackware. Its got a great feel.

#**1623** 5th June 2010, 05:52 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by smr54

Another alternative might be Vector, though I'm not sure if it's based on Slack any longer.

I tried vector last week in vbox, and have to say it's pretty good. It uses kde 3.5.10 ( I still don't like kde 4)

DavidMcCann · #**1624** 5th June 2010, 05:22 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by smr54

Heh, what a way to start a war. (I know you don't mean to, I'm just being droll). What about Slackware itself, and adding slapt-get or one of those?

I'm just interested to see if anyone has managed to drag Slackware into the 21st century

Apart from its unfriendlyness, Slackware just lacks too much. Why should I want a distro that lacks Gnome, and where the only source of Evolution seems to be a web site in Italian? As for the old slogan, "Learn Red Hat and you know Red Hat, learn Slackware and you know Linux", how can that be true as Slackware gets more out of step? There's not much milage in being confident with Lilo when everyone is using Grub!

It's interesting that Linus uses Fedora or Ubuntu.

smr54 · #**1625** 5th June 2010, 06:46 PM

Well, back in the 90's, when that phrase originated, there were only a few types of Linux around--RH had rpm, Slack had no package management....but the statement could be debated even back then. As it could now--learn any particular distribution, and a lot of it is spent on the distribution's quirks--if RH based, rpm and yum, if Debian based, dpkg and apt-get, and so on.

DavidMcCann · #**1626** 6th June 2010, 06:07 PM

The trouble is that, not only do slackers still say it, but some of them on linuxquestions insist on recommending it to Windows refugees! I like to quote another old saying, from Rute: "It’s a pain to install and manage, although school kids who don’t know any better love it."

smr54 · #**1627** 6th June 2010, 06:19 PM

<shrugs>. Well, since Linux is only a kernel, that is something to interface with the hardware, it doesn't strike me as a correct statement.

If a Windows refugee wants to learn about editing text files and such, it's probably a good choice. If they're simply someone looking to get away from Windows, but want the same point, click, voila, then it probably isn't.

skolnick · #**1628** 6th June 2010, 06:38 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DavidMcCann

I'm just interested to see if anyone has managed to drag Slackware into the 21st century

Apart from its unfriendlyness, Slackware just lacks too much. Why should I want a distro that lacks Gnome, and where the only source of Evolution seems to be a web site in Italian? As for the old slogan, "Learn Red Hat and you know Red Hat, learn Slackware and you know Linux", how can that be true as Slackware gets more out of step? There's not much milage in being confident with Lilo when everyone is using Grub!

It's interesting that Linus uses Fedora or Ubuntu.

Slackware is the most UNIX-like distro I've seen so far. Most of the distros (Fedora, Opensuse, Ubuntu, even Debian!) have gone a Windows path. They try to be as user-friendly as possible, by automating some things, whereas Slackware stays with the manual process. However, *sometimes* making things automatic is a problem, since it means the older way of doing things will not work (for instance, I can manually configure networking on a server running CentOS/RHEL just by modifying the network startup scripts, but for some reason I haven't been able to do this under Fedora 12 using NetworkManager). Another example would be Pulseaudio (which I like a lot by the way) because it seems it doesn't have a command-line tool to manage it, only GUI (easier, but not as powerful).

Regarding your rant about Slackware not having GNOME, I really love KDE and dislike GNOME. In fact, even tough my laptop runs Fedora 12, I don't have GNOME installed. I prefer kmail to evolution, so I guess it's all about taste. And the slogan is still true. If you learn only the GUI way of doing things, you learned just a couple of clicks. But with slackware you are forced to understand how things work under the hood, so you can tweak/fix/configure them. That's what it means, and it holds true in many ways even today.

Regards.

MorphingDragon · #**1629** 7th June 2010, 04:33 AM

Im trying out that magical Linux distro known as Mac OSX.

water spirit · #**1630** 10th June 2010, 12:39 PM

Fedora Release 13

dragonbite · #**1631** 10th June 2010, 02:10 PM

Right now I'm trying Ubuntu 10.04. I say "trying" it because it has the Intel 855 GPU issue so it isn't 100% working yet and I am keeping my option of replacing it with something else (or the first one that resolves this issue).

joe.pelayo · #**1632** 10th June 2010, 03:38 PM

In the past two days I tried Easypeasy 1.5 in my older laptop. I have to say that even though I found it rather usable and user friendly I don't see myself using it very much.

It has a good selection of software and tries to enable cool visual effects, but if the hardware isn't completely capable there might be an out-of-the-box frustrating experience if you don't know where to turn visual effects off. Speed-wise it is fast.

Only downside (for me, not for most netbook owners) is the 'limited' interface (thought for small screens, without a proper task bar). Any way I'll continue checking its development because I am want to deploy it in the computer at my parent's (who aren't very computer literate), and Easypeasy is one of the easiest Linux distros (and operating systems) I've tried (the 'absolute' easiest being Linpus, but to be fair that one is crap).

Thanks,
Joe.

RupertPupkin · #**1633** 10th June 2010, 04:14 PM

I'm using Fedora 13, and loving it!

dragonbite · #**1634** 10th June 2010, 05:00 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by joe.pelayo

Only downside (for me, not for most netbook owners) is the 'limited' interface (thought for small screens, without a proper task bar). Any way I'll continue checking its development because I am want to deploy it in the computer at my parent's (who aren't very computer literate), and Easypeasy is one of the easiest Linux distros (and operating systems) I've tried (the 'absolute' easiest being Linpus, but to be fair that one is crap).

Is there any way to set up MeeGo's interface or similar to UNR (ubuntu netbook remix) or their new Unity desktop environment to a non-ubuntu system?

Unity looks promising, but it is in Beta and as far as I know it's not available for other distros yet (too new?).

MorphingDragon · #**1635** 13th June 2010, 04:20 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by dragonbite

Right now I'm trying Ubuntu 10.04. I say "trying" it because it has the Intel 855 GPU issue so it isn't 100% working yet and I am keeping my option of replacing it with something else (or the first one that resolves this issue).

I read the Linux Mint doesnt have the problems that ubuntu has.