Trying a few other distros

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flarkit

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I've been using Ubuntu since 7.04, where I started enjoying the ease of use more. I found the hops from 7.10 to 9.04 to be worthwhile too.

I was curious about the other major distros though, wanting to see how Fedora Core, Suse and Mandriva have developed since I tried those 6 years ago.

First up, I downloaded the FC 11 Live CD to install onto a spare HDD. It refused to install using my normal partition scheme of "/", "/home" and swap. I found out that I needed a small "/root" using the same filesystem as the Live CD. Then it didn't find my existing installations of XP and Ubuntu. Next!
:rolleyes:

I bought a Linux magazine with dual-sided SLED 11 DVD (32-bit and 64-bit) on Monday. This had zero problems adding my Ubuntu and XP installations to Grub. Found that I can't stand KDE 4.1.x's menus though. They're confusing to navigate and for some reason they have the YaST icon in 3 different places. It wouldn't connect to my XFi (despite installing Creative's drivers) and refused to mount any of my other OS partitions.

So the score stands at Ubuntu:2, FC 11: 0, SLED 11: 0

Now I need to get hold of Mandriva 2009 ;)
 
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flarkit said:
It wouldn't connect to my XFi (despite installing Creative's drivers)
Click to expand...
Don't worry about the X-Fi problems. Soon a driver will enter the kernel mainline, is already available in ALSA-git repo.

This means (hopefully) that the driver will enter into 2.6.31 (if not definitely 2.6.32) kernel, which means all distro's upgrading to that kernel will have almost proper X-Fi support.

Usually this means Ubuntu, Archlinux, Gentoo and so on. Debian, Fedora, Centos, Redhat and so ALWAYS lag behind with kernels (I hate their philosophy of backporting patches). Suse/Mandriva I am not sure how long this will take.
 
flarkit said:
I've been using Ubuntu since 7.04, where I started enjoying the ease of use more. I found the hops from 7.10 to 9.04 to be worthwhile too.

I was curious about the other major distros though, wanting to see how Fedora Core, Suse and Mandriva have developed since I tried those 6 years ago.

First up, I downloaded the FC 11 Live CD to install onto a spare HDD. It refused to install using my normal partition scheme of "/", "/home" and swap. I found out that I needed a small "/root" using the same filesystem as the Live CD. Then it didn't find my existing installations of XP and Ubuntu. Next!
:rolleyes:

I bought a Linux magazine with dual-sided SLED 11 DVD (32-bit and 64-bit) on Monday. This had zero problems adding my Ubuntu and XP installations to Grub. Found that I can't stand KDE 4.1.x's menus though. They're confusing to navigate and for some reason they have the YaST icon in 3 different places. It wouldn't connect to my XFi (despite installing Creative's drivers) and refused to mount any of my other OS partitions.

So the score stands at Ubuntu:2, FC 11: 0, SLED 11: 0

Now I need to get hold of Mandriva 2009 ;)
Click to expand...

and then you won't look back :D
 
I find that SUSE, Mandriva and Fedora are fun to try out - others are happy to stick with it... but I've always been at home with Debian-distros (Debian, Ubuntu and Mint).
 
Havn't looked back since I first tried out Mandriva 2009.0 :D
 
flarkit said:
Do you have a copy perhaps? Looking for a DVD of Mandriva 2009, since I could probably grab a Live CD locally
Click to expand...

I only ever download the live CD, then add just what I need. Couldn't be bothered downloading the whole dvd as there is so much on there that I don't use. Just make sure you add the correct repo's and then its fine.
 
flarkit said:
Found that I can't stand KDE 4.1.x's menus though. They're confusing to navigate and for some reason they have the YaST icon in 3 different places.
Click to expand...

You know that you can change it to classic kde3.5 style by simply right clicking on the application launcher icon? You can also install a totally different menu system.
 
ponder said:
You know that you can change it to classic kde3.5 style by simply right clicking on the application launcher icon? You can also install a totally different menu system.
Click to expand...

Yep, I do know this. The purpose of the exercise was to see how easy the OS is to use out of the box. I'd rather not downgrade to KDE 3.5, but might try to upgrade to 4.2 sometime, which is supposed to be a major improvement.

So far though, my bias remains towards Ubuntu
 
well then you better rule out most distros that use KDE as their base DE

EDIT: Although didn't openSUSE move to gnome when Novell took over?
 
flarkit said:
I'd rather not downgrade to KDE 3.5, but might try to upgrade to 4.2 sometime, which is supposed to be a major improvement.
Click to expand...

No need to downgrade 4.2 to 3.5 if you can simply just change the menu with a right-click of the mouse.

Btw. 4.3 will be out next month incase you want to wait.
 
looking at fedoraforums, it seems that when you use a LiveCD, you must have the root partition as ext4 and it automatically creates a /boot partition. apparently this does not happen if you choose another install medium.

but it is swak nonetheless
 
milomak said:
looking at fedoraforums, it seems that when you use a LiveCD, you must have the root partition as ext4 and it automatically creates a /boot partition. apparently this does not happen if you choose another install medium.

but it is swak nonetheless
Click to expand...

The LiveCD is ext3, not ext4. I'd be happy if it insisted on ext4 :)
 
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flarkit said:
The LiveCD is ext3, not ext3. I'd be happy if it insisted on ext4 :)
Click to expand...

that's strange given that the beta version livecd I had was able to install create, format and install the root partition to an ext4 partition.

Infat it was one the things that is used to push F11.
 
I tried Mandriva One 2009.1 yesterday. The install went fairly ok and I was able to sort out a few niggles as well.

Likes:
- KDE 4.2 is pretty enough
- The Nvidia drivers seem to be fine
- Installed XFi drivers and sound worked after a reboot (but screeched like crazy immediately after the install)
- Found out how to change the media sources to local repos

Dislikes:
- KDE's desktop cube sucks (unless I'm using it wrong). It's clunky
- I added a separate ppp connection for local-only ADSL, but couldn't seem to start it up
- Eventually managed to mount my other partitions, but it was a struggle

So far, I like this KDE implementation more than Suse's, but it doesn't make my life easier than Ubuntu +Gnome, so I'll be staying there for now. Mandriva is attractive and interesting though, so I would probably have stuck with it, if I weren't using Ubuntu.
 
flarkit said:
First up, I downloaded the FC 11 Live CD to install onto a spare HDD. It refused to install using my normal partition scheme of "/", "/home" and swap. I found out that I needed a small "/root" using the same filesystem as the Live CD. Then it didn't find my existing installations of XP and Ubuntu.
Click to expand...

Don't even get me started on installing F11 from live cd :mad:

I had endless problems with it until I just decided to install ubuntu9.04 and right out of the box everything seems to be working fine. :)
 
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