ianw1974 Posted February 28, 2007 Report Share Posted February 28, 2007 I thought I'd write and give my experiences of finding a new distro for me. In particular, this came about for one of two reasons. The first, was my new laptop at work. It's a Toshiba Tecra A8 with Intel Core 2 Duo. This in itself was a minor problem for Mandriva, as I had to simply disable the second core while I was installing, and until I'd installed a kernel of at least 2.6.18 or higher with smp support. In fact, I was running Mandriva on it for a month or so. The second problem, was that we now have a native Linux version of Lotus Notes. Nice, yeah, it is. However, it's an absolutely pain to set up. One of the main reasons for this is the lack of dependency information supplied by IBM. Sure, they list some, but very very basic stuff - like you need Gnome, and you need Mozilla 1.7.12. And that's about as far as it goes. I could never get the native client for Lotus Notes to work on Mandriva 2007.0. There are a few reasons for this, mainly because a dependency isn't available through urpmi. However, it will be from when Mandriva 2007.1 is released, as I can see the dependency I require in the FTP tree. I had put Kubuntu on my machine, and after a bit of trial and error, got Lotus Notes working eventually. However, it's stability wasn't what I was expecting. No sooner than a week had passed, and the kernel would no longer boot while the Dual Core was enabled. I disabled it, and was trying to get a kernel compiled, but it just wasn't having it. I know I needed at least 2.6.18 to be happy that the Dual Core would work fine. I was then in limbo, no email other than using wine with Lotus Notes, which is OK, except that I cannot get special characters, that are required in the Polish language. And trying to read emails with these in, is horrendous because they are all in hiroglyphic form. So, I spent the next few days trying to find out what distros would work with the native Lotus Notes client. So far, I've managed to get it working with: CentOS Debian 3.1 Debian Etch (sid too) Gentoo 2006.1 Kubuntu 6.10 (edgy) RHEL4 Ubuntu 6.10 (edgy) So, my next choice was to figure out what was best for me. Since Kubuntu, or Ubuntu was causing me problems on my hardware, this dropped them off the list. CentOS and RHEL4, while great, also run old kernels, so I figured I was going to have a lot of problems with them. Also, I could get the latest and greatest KDE on there perfectly well, but I didn't want to mess around with something too much. I like the latest packages, but there are no easy repositories for CentOS or even Red Hat to do this. The same with Debian 3.1. Easy to set up Lotus Notes, but not too up-to-date for me. I'd have problems with the hardware. For those of you, who might suggest using Arch Linux. I did try, but Lotus Notes would not work at all on this. Maybe I'll try it again later, but I ran out of time trying to figure it all out. So, that effectively left me with two distros. Gentoo or Debian Etch/Sid. Gentoo, I really like, but it's not easy for a desktop system, and takes a really long time to get it installed. So, I did a net install of Debian Etch. Unfortunately, after doing this I found that one of the dependencies I required, wasn't there. I did find, that it was available in sid, so I've now upgraded the system from etch to sid. And now, I have all I need. Access to lots of packages, Lotus Notes works, all my hardware is working fine with the Dual Core enabled. And sid, is pretty damn stable indeed. Not had any problems so far. My desktop has been running it for a week now, and my laptop just from today. Whilst Debian is a lot different from rpm distros such as Mandriva, I think it's definitely worth trying if you're thinking about a new distro. It can be a challenge though, and learning where everything is located, but it's not overly difficult than I was expecting it to be. Or maybe, it's just because I'm much more at home with Linux now, than I would have been when starting from scratch :P Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Greg2 Posted February 28, 2007 Report Share Posted February 28, 2007 I did a net install of Debian Etch. Unfortunately, after doing this I found that one of the dependencies I required, wasn't there. I did find, that it was available in sid, so I've now upgraded the system from etch to sid. Did you do that upgrade as per this post: https://mandrivausers.org/index.php?s=&...st&p=299046 or did you use the script that is mentioned next in that thread? I've been waiting to see how that upgrade went... I may give it a try. :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted February 28, 2007 Author Report Share Posted February 28, 2007 I did the netinstall of etch, which overwrote the existing install of Kubuntu. I then effectively did this next: apt-get update apt-get upgrade apt-get dist-upgrade to ensure I had all the updated etch packages. Then, I edited the /etc/apt/sources.list file to point to sid with commenting out all the existing etch sources, and adding: deb http://ftp.pl.debian.org/debian/ sid main contrib non-free deb-src http://ftp.pl.debian.org/debian/ sid main contrib non-free I'm in Poland, which is why I'm using a Polish mirror, else I'd use my next closest one. After this, I did the same process of what I did above, so: apt-get update apt-get upgrade apt-get dist-upgrade and I'm now on the latest of all packages for etch/sid or whatever I am now :P Never used the sidux script, from which gowator mentioned. Maybe I'll do it on a test system someday. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pmpatrick Posted February 28, 2007 Report Share Posted February 28, 2007 If you want a quick debian sid install, you can also take a look at a kanotix fork, sidux: http://sidux.com/index.html It has a current 2.6.20 kernel. I installed this last week and it seems pretty stable so far. Still don't like the debian font rendering but it is getting much better. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Greg2 Posted February 28, 2007 Report Share Posted February 28, 2007 and I'm now on the latest of all packages for etch/sid or whatever I am now :P Thanks, I'll give that a go this weekend. What kernel did that give you? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted February 28, 2007 Author Report Share Posted February 28, 2007 After all updates, running 2.6.18.4 :) The netinstall ISO is pretty small, maybe 150MB or something like that. As long as you've got a nice fast internet connection, all is pretty cool. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ramfree17 Posted March 1, 2007 Report Share Posted March 1, 2007 hey ian, how much data did you think you managed to pull through the wire? i am thinking of installing something else on my laptop but this is my main machine so i want to know if i can pull it off in a day. or else my wife will have my hide for spending so much time on the computer without actually doing anything. ciao! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted March 1, 2007 Author Report Share Posted March 1, 2007 Depends how fast your connection is. Mine was done overnight, but my desktop took about six hours at anywhere between 16kbps and 45kbps. Reason - they put a QoS on the internet connection during the day :(( Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arctic Posted March 1, 2007 Report Share Posted March 1, 2007 My Debian systems were set up in ~1:30 to 2 hours with a download speed of ~124 kb/s. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted March 1, 2007 Author Report Share Posted March 1, 2007 I can't wait for 1mb at home. I might try it on some of my machines here :) Only prob I got so far is the time, and timezones. I change the time, reboot, and it's still back an hour ahead than it should be. I'm not even dual booting, so no idea why it's increasing an hour each time it boots. For example, it's saying 4PM UK time, and the time is correct, but my timezone is wrong. So I set it back to 3PM, leaving at UK time, since UK time was 3PM (4pm in Poland). I reboot, and then it's back to 4pm again. If I put the time zone to Europe/Warsaw, the time is 5pm when it should be 4pm. I change it to 4pm, reboot, and it's back to 5pm again. Sigh..... Maybe I have to reset the time in the BIOS before booting into Debian :unsure: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gowator Posted March 1, 2007 Report Share Posted March 1, 2007 If you want a quick debian sid install, you can also take a look at a kanotix fork, sidux: http://sidux.com/index.html It has a current 2.6.20 kernel. I installed this last week and it seems pretty stable so far. Still don't like the debian font rendering but it is getting much better. fixfonts -e should be a good start... you can also install the mscorefonts (for web stuff) ... All of this can be done from h2-s script... it actually just chains together the various utilities. Basically its dpkg does the fixing .. you just need to run it a few times on really major stuff....as it works through layers of deps... For example, it's saying 4PM UK time, and the time is correct, but my timezone is wrong. So I set it back to 3PM, leaving at UK time, since UK time was 3PM (4pm in Poland). I reboot, and then it's back to 4pm again. If I put the time zone to Europe/Warsaw, the time is 5pm when it should be 4pm. I change it to 4pm, reboot, and it's back to 5pm again. Sigh..... Set it to HW clock at GMT then use timezones... adjtimex works for non connected machines.... but I use ntp...(apt-get install ntpdate) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arctic Posted March 1, 2007 Report Share Posted March 1, 2007 but I use ntp...(apt-get install ntpdate)Me, too. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ramfree17 Posted March 1, 2007 Report Share Posted March 1, 2007 My Debian systems were set up in ~1:30 to 2 hours with a download speed of ~124 kb/s. assuming i can get a steady speed of 20kbps, that would still mean about 12 hours in total. hmmn... i think i have to butter up the wife so she wont get extremely mad when i do manage to render the laptop useless. ciao! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted March 2, 2007 Author Report Share Posted March 2, 2007 I fixed my date thing. I basically left it at UK time, rebooted, changed the time in the BIOS, and then I could use the timezone thing to fix it back in the OS. Because I'd set it to UK, it used my current time as the basis of UK, even though it was an hour ahead of UK time, if ya get what I mean ;) EDIT: Just done the fonts thing, much better now. In fact, all I did was: aptitude install msttcorefonts Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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