Lately I’ve been playing around with Linux on my primary WinTel box at home, in thought that I might soon replace Windows XP on my home server with a flavor of Linux. But that begs the question:
Which one?
I’ve pretty much decided that I’d like to use a Debian-based distro. I had been playing with Red Hat 9 but they’ve decided to focus on the server market, and I didn’t have much luck with Fedora. Besides I like the “free as in speech” attitude of the Debian distros.
I’ve done some research and I’m looking at Debian/sarge, a Knoppix hard drive install or Gentoo.
I’m not a Linux guru, yet, so a fairly easy installation would be ideal — Debian has an installer, Knoppix is fairly easy, and I looked over Gentoo’s install instructions, and I think I could handle a Stage 2 installation.
So other than the install-factor, I’m not sure what other criteria I should judge them on. I don’t know how big a repository Gentoo has for its portage system.
I’d like to end up using the distro on my headless server as well as a dual-boot option on my main WinTel box…
I’ve been running Linux on my laptop (used at home, at work and on the road) for almost a year, and I’ve gone from Red Hat 8 to Mandrake 9 to Red Hat 9 to Fedora Core 1, which I have presently.
Fedora is by far the best Linux distribution I’ve used. It’s got a lot going for it: Ease of installation, ease of use, a healthy selection of packages, a helpful and excited community, and a commitment to providing cutting-edge packages. Highly recommended. What sorts of problems did you have with it?
Adrian, how was the trip?
Fedora wasn’t playing nice with some combination of my hardware (probably my Radeon 9800). X wouldn’t start and the setup process wouldn’t finish the “firstboot” process.
I’m also a big fan of apt-get, and though I know you can get it for Red Hat, I like the fact that you can upgrade an entire Debian system (say from Woody to Sarge) via apt-get, which is a nice feature for my headless server…
Right now I’m leaning toward Knoppix since I can try it out easily and then essentially turn it into a Debian/Sarge install onto the HD.