[Lancaster] Help me select a distrob

[Matt Fletcher]

Debian may be a geek's distro, I cannot say as I have not used it, but I 
have used Ubuntu for about a year now, and I have found it to be a very 
user friendly operating system. It lives up to its "Linux for Human 
Beings" tagline well. Although it does use DEBs for it's packages, like 
Debian it uses the apt-get system to automatically download packages 
(and their dependent packages) from the internet when you install them 
by browsing for them in either a GUI package browser or using the 
apt-get command line client.

If you have had experience with either the GNOME or KDE desktop 
environments, I would pick the derivative you're already used to; Ubuntu 
for GNOME, Kubuntu for KDE. Try and use both on someone else's machine 
first to see which you prefer. I love the uncluttered desktop that GNOME 
provides, but your needs may vary. I have set up a 5 machine network at 
my local church using Kubuntu, and the youngsters there love it.

One final point on Ubuntu is that by using either the Automatix or Easy 
Ubuntu packages, it is very easy to get your hands on the commercial 
software (realplayer, adobe reader, dvd progs) that most distros choose 
to omit from their software repositories.

Matt Fletcher

Email: info at matt-fletcher.co.uk
Web: http://www.matt-fletcher.co.uk/
Phone: 01524 426559
Mobile: 07792 148897

Ken Walton wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-04-18 at 14:18 +0100, Ken Hough wrote:
> 
>>AFAIK, Ubuntu uses DEB packages. Not too surprising as it's based on 
>>Debian. Mandriva, Fedora and SuSE all use RPM. Debian itself is a bit of 
>>a geek's distro. Personally, I find it a pain.
>>
> 
> Yes, Ubuntu does use DEB packages, though there's a utility to convert
> RPMs into DEBs, should you need to. I've switched to Ubuntu from SUSE
> recently, and found it runs *much* faster on my old dual 600MHz, 256MB
> desktop than SUSE did. I think it needs less base memory, so it doesn't
> use the swap file half so much. And I've found the online documentation
> for Ubuntu better than that for OpenSUSE. But I've only been running
> Linux for 6 months or so, so I'm not the most experienced person to have
> an opinion :-)
> 
>