[cumbria_lug] Re: new distro advice

[grouper at beehive.demon.co.uk]

Hey Guys... 

I'd certainly chip in with the fedora core 1 crowd. It's very clean and if you 
are comfy with redhat, it's a winner. 

If you've got access to broadband and a reasonable spec machine I would 
certainly have a look at gentoo. The main advantage/disadvantage of gentoo is 
that everything that you run will be compiled on your box. Whilst this seems 
like it will take some time (and it does!) you will reap the rewards with a 
very stable and fast system (all other things being equal, which they usually 
aren't!) and you can kiss lib conflicts and dependancy hell good-bye.

Having said that, I use Suse 9 on my systems at work and home. It does things 
a little differently from the redhat model but not so much that I've ever 
found it a problem. I particularly like the ability to maintain different 
profiles so that switching between home and work networks and settings is 
dead easy (scpm) and the fact that yast2 is a great config tool, IMHO. It's 
the first one I've used that I've not abandoned because it ends up fsck'ing 
everything up. As I'm comfortable doing configs with vi, I wouldn't have 
thought it would be a big deal but I use it all the time. 

Another big plus with suse is that they package everything under the sun... 
well almost. If you pony up the pounds for the pro version, there will be 
very little that you won't find on the DVD's. 

The only downside to suse (apart from the odd niggle) is that because it's got 
a large German user base, much of what you google in aid of sorting a problem 
comes back in German. Maybe the ack by Novell will shift this a bit but I 
have found it to be a barrier at times. Even with babelfish 8^)

I've used Mandrake 9.2 for a bit but I ended up taking it off. Installed 
flawlessly on two different laptops (as did every other distro I've mentioned 
so maybe not such a big deal) but I couldn't find a compelling reason to keep 
it on and I've always found their distro to be too close to the bleeding 
edge. 

Have fun!

Oran