Which Linux to use?
Sunday, October 23, 2005 10:28The hard drive on my home dev box ran into some problems. When mounting /usr the hard disk is making scratching noise and stuck at 2%. I don’t know what to make of it, other than that it’s not good.
Handily, I have another 160G Western Digital internal hard drive at home. So, I thought I should take this opportunity to use this hard drive, and upgrade to a newer linux from redhat 6.2.
I am seeking recommendations from folks on what linux i should use and why. Here is my anticipated usage & some requirements
- good bit of php/perl coding.
- some desktop utilities. May be play a game of free civ once in a while
- Not any calendaring or other apps
- I fantasize about being able to write c/c++ modules that do some great things, but never got around to writing any in the last year.
- I don’t want to pay.
- I want it to be easy.
Eron suggested that i should use gentoo linux if i am a hacker and mandriva if i am an app user. Ofcourse, chuck cautioned against gentoo because i’d have to compile every app (apparently open office takes 2 days to compile)
Any suggestions? thoughts?
ankur says:
November 3rd, 2005 at 3:48 am
try freeBSD once
swong says:
November 10th, 2005 at 10:45 am
Try Ubuntu. With Ubuntu you get the best of Debian (namely apt-get to keep the system up to date) with a lot of other good stuff thrown in.
Otherwise, I would recommend Fedora Core 4, though their YUM is not as good as apt-get.
MichaelB says:
November 15th, 2005 at 1:04 pm
Second for Ubuntu. It is easy, free (get free CDs), and should meet your other requirements too.
amrikand00d says:
November 26th, 2005 at 4:57 pm
Arch - i686 optimized
Dave says:
April 29th, 2006 at 2:02 pm
I have tried RedHat, FC5, Mandriva 2006, SUSE 9.0/9.3/10 and looked at Debian and Ubuntu.
I use SUSE 10 now. I got a free DVD disk from Linux Pro Magazine (I htink that was the mag!).
SUSE 10 or any version I imagine has just about any general application you need: Acrobat. Open Office, Mozilla (not latest version) and I had no problem loading rpms for Thinderbird and the latest Firefox.
If I get stuck there is always someone to ask but this is true of just about all distributions