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Wanting to experiment with another distro


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I have become very comfortable with MDK over the last 11 months, and feal I should start experimenting with a more technical distro.

 

I have downloaded ISOs for SUSE 9.1 personal and UBUNTU. These are 2 that I've been wanting to try, but I would appreciate some reccomendations. Keep in mind that My whole experience outside of Windows has been only 11 months. I want to try a Linux flavor that will help me to improve and develop but not be too technical that I'm going to get frustrated.

 

Are my 2 choices going to fill that description or is there another version that I should try.

 

Right now I'm backing up all of my docs/media to a USB HD, and will probably try for an install tomorrow.

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Out of those almost definately Ubuntu.

Suse is so dumbed down it makes Mandrake look like handholding .. so if you are looking for a more technically challenging distro or one forcing you to learn a bit more then I would stay away from suse.

If on the other hand you wanna play at sorting out deps and finding themes etc don't work and have to hack then then suse might provide some fun? I see it as a distro that does what it does out of the box with a very small learning curve but then a huge leap to actually get stuff not specifically deisnged for Suse to work (although you can use apt4rpm) Also suse personal is a waste of time, the pro is very cheap and its all about that shiny boxed package... the excellent manuals etc... so these would sway my mind!

 

However lets see what other folks think :D

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Why play around? You have an rpm based distro, and many of the rpm based distros are really similar and quite user friendly. Jump off the pier and do a gentoo or arch linux. You will learn all about configuration, even if you do not successfully finish the install! I do multiple distros so that I can boot into something working and not get too frustrated. Hey, install gentoo from inside of Mandrake! You will learn soooo much!

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If you choose the deb flavor and use kde go 'debian'

 

If you use gnome go ubuntu. It's debian with gnome/python developers, always will be free (according to the homepage), and of course uses apt. I love it! You can have kde with ubuntu but I believe the range of choices and concentration on devel is better in deb that ubuntu, from what I've read.

 

There's always LFS :P If you can read, comprehend, and copy and paste, it's not hard and you WILL learn. I did it after 1 year of linux and 2 years of even having a pc.

Edited by bvc
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Well, I'm posting from my new Ubuntu machine.

 

Got so ansy, I decided to go Ubuntu first. I'm really liking it. Everything works right off. My USB HD is running at full speed (I had to manualy insert it into fstab before, to get it to run at full speed) and it looks nice. BTY I'm GNOME user, so thanks for the reccomendation Gowator and BVC.

 

I'll give this one a shot for a few wks.

 

Now I just have to figure out how to install the apps I need. Is there a Debian equivalent to URPMI? What kind of packages do I use? And other Ubuntu Noobish questions like that.

 

I'm reading thru the other Ubuntu posts, but If any of you can direct me to one that is especially helpfull, I'd appreciate it. Also, a good Ubuntu board would help.

 

I have MDK on my office computers and will probably stick with it when the 10.1 OE ISOs are available, but I'm gona use my home computer as the learning ground.

Edited by kmc77
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I've played with SUSE 9.1 Personal at the office... don't go there, what you see is what you get. No more, not even GCC...

 

SUSE 9.1 Professional on the other hand is nice. I'm running it at home now, and it's smooth, slick and stable.

 

...but there is really not very much to learn, YaST is very similar to URPMI/RPMDrake only less contrib-sources available. Other GUI configs are a bit different, but not too much. It's a matter of taste I think.

 

I might jump back to Mandrake if 10.1 Official is as good as it looks.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Well, I did something similar. I got SuSE 9.2 Pro and Debian 3.0 R3 via eBay to check them out. Currently there is no room on this computer for Debian (not enough hard disk space). Besides, I would rather play with Debian on a separate box, until I am comfortable with it.

 

Look at my sig, and you will see why I have no space. hehehe

 

Win98SE: MSDOS and win3.1 - 98 games

 

Windows 2000 Pro: 3D and 2D CGI

 

Mandrake Linux powerpack: my main distro for the moment

 

SuSE 9.2 Pro: evaluating

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Arctic, spare time is ALL I have. I have been disabled for over 25 years. Anyways, all of my Windows games won't run in win2k pro ot NT. The only reason I have 2000 pro, is that some of my 3D CGI apps won't run properly in win98se (if at all), and don't have Linux versions. My 3 hdds are partitioned as follows:

 

hda: (120 GB maxtor)

20 GB fat32 primary, 94.49 GB ntfs primary

 

hdb: (160 GB maxtor)

2 x 30 GB reiserFS primary, 2 GB linux swap logical, 2 x reiserFS logical (dividing space evenly)

 

hdc: (120 GB maxtor)

4 x fat32 primary (pictures, archives, cgicontent, win98swap). Of these, the first 3 have to accessable to win98se, win2k pro, Mandrake, and SuSE in read/write mode.

 

I need another hdd, for my other computer (actually more than one). Then I can play a bit with Debian, and eventually get around to making that system my CGI box. I had a pair of 61 GB maxtors, but, the 120s replaced those, and I gave the 61s to a friend.

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