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OS for a Laptop


steppenwolf1984
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OK, if I don't get slammed by taxes and IF I don't have a sudden financial emergency, and IF...you get the picture...If I get this new laptop - probably an HP

90 something-something business notebook...Im debating on which OS or OSes to load up based on what I have in the CD collection. My thoughts are Fedora Core 3 and Suse 9.2 (for when I don't wanna "redhat-config-ANYTHING" or to show off the eye candy to possible converts...)on a dual boot; or - and this may be a stretch - Solaris 10 with the ability to emulate other OS's , such as the Linux of my choice.

 

The goal is to load something I have to learn to tweak and build on and can break and rebuild. Something with either readily available software or comes with enough in the intial install packages (like-gulp-Solaris). Ive got the Ubuntu cds and DSL and Slax as well but not a whole lot of software for either Debian or Slack. Internet connection is sketchy and not dependable for downloading packages and updates. With my MDK handling my daily computer needs and work, I'm looking for something to wrassle with and of course, learn from ...distro wise and linux wise in general. (Or Unix-wise...?)

 

signed Undecided

 

[moved from Talk-Talk by spinynorman]

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My suggestion: Slackware. It's only two CD's and you WILL learn a lot with Slackware. And as Slack is a rock-stable distro, you don't need to update every week for bugfixes and new packages. There are only a few update-packages available for e.g. 10.1 because the quality of packages is very very high.

 

You can make Slackware as lean or bloated as you want, running with only minimal packages and e.g TWM or the full fun of KDE, Gnome, Windowmaker, Fluxbox etc. Several hours of tweaking are guaranteed and for free. ;)

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For what it's worth, I find that Debian is something you can wrestle with :lol: but it is not on your list.

 

However, if you get this shiny new laptop, it is bound to be powerfull, so my advice would be to install some rock-stable linux (or other) distribution and then to run your experiments (debian, fedora...) in fast virtual machines (user-mode linux, qemu, xen, plex86...)

 

Yves.

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Kanotix... best Debian out there.

And it's Sid, so I can assure you that you will brake your system more than once! :D

Also Vector Linux- highly customizable Slackware with lots of nice extras.

And of course my current choice, Arch Linux, is a superb choice for a laptop, and customizable as far as you can imagine.

Edited by scarecrow
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I think I'd probably give debian or gentoo a go, because I only really use Mandrake/Mandriva, and have no idea about any of the other distros (or whether the ones I mentioned you'd be able to wrestle with).

 

At least, they are the two I would start with, and then work from there :P

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Well, obviously everybody is going to suggest their favourite distro to you, so I'm going to go ahead and reccommend Gentoo.

 

Gentoo is lightweight, offers an awesome learning curve and the Gentoo kernel (if you choose to use it) has some cool stuff in it for laptops.

 

If you want something easier to install, go Ubuntu. It's the best "friendly" distro out there IMHO.

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Kanotix... best Debian out there.

And it's Sid, so I can assure you that you will brake your system more than once! :D

Also Vector Linux- highly customizable Slackware with lots of nice extras.

And of course my current choice, Arch Linux, is a superb choice for a laptop, and customizable as far as you can imagine.

 

Yep its fun and doesn't need installing yet it has 99% of everything you need without installing and if you do install its pure debian not nearly like knoppix! :jester:

 

The fun part is you get to check it all out before installing ... kano's scripts work like a dream and if not then ytou can try something else without wasting much time...

 

Ubuntu is proving nice but I hate their use of sudo and it is possibly the most insecure distro possible... (basically they have sudo completely open so "sudo passwd root" is possible... from a cgi or anything??) also they have messed with the gnome config stuff and made their own which is stupid and holding back linux in general ....(like mandrake and suse)

 

If you don't like fun then Suse is ... well boring and stable and lots of stuff will just work however it comes wih YAST possibly the worst bit of software ever written for the popularity of linux ... suse without YAST (or with KDE control panel or gnome control not fsck'd) would be a cracking distro on a laptop!

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Apart from arctic, ianw and a few others besides myself who use Mandriva, I worry how soon it will be before MUB gets renamed to something other than related to Mandriva. Something like perhaps MOOSs (Mostly Other Operating Systems:D :D :D :D

 

Cheers. John.

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Apart from arctic, ianw and a few others besides myself who use Mandriva, I worry how soon it will be before MUB gets renamed to something other than related to Mandriva. ...

I guess you can relax. If you take a close look at it, the number of users on this board who use other distros than Mandriva exclusively is quite limited. There are maybe 20 or 30 users who Gentoo, Fedora, Ubuntu, SUSE, etc. And some of them still have a Mandriva partition. And taking the number of users on this board into account, the percentage of "other distros" used here is not that high. ;)

 

Anyway, I doubt that I won't have a Mandriva-box in the near future. Although LE2005 was a bit disappointing for me, I still love this distro (10.1 was very very nice). Easy to use, well written, useful tools and it simply works for me. The only thing I don't like is the galaxy-theme. But then ... there are dozens of themes available, right? :D

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Arch might be for you, in some respects it's gentoo without all the compiling.

 

Which is why it's the perfect distro! :P

 

I'm running arch on my laptop - and it all good so far...

 

That comming from you phunni is a lot. I remember when you constantly had problems with Arch, things aren't always working the way you wanted the to. I remember I used to think you might be the testing pet of Linux. Everything that could go wrong goes wrong onto you.

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