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Journal eglamkowski's Journal: linux recommendations 16

Journal by eglamkowski

So, I have TWO hard drives I get to install this weekend, one for a desktop and one for a laptop. Which versions of linux should I put on which drive? I've used RedHat and Mandrake and both were fine as far as I'm concerned. Anybody care to offer up a different distro as preferable?

The only thing that might be tricky is that the desktop has an ancient 3Com 3905C-TX-M NIC and the laptop will generally be getting its internet from a cable modem via USB.

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linux recommendations

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  • Fedora or Ubuntu, though so far my experience has been mostly with RedHat/Fedora, I have heard plenty of good things about Ubuntu.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Both picked up all the hardware in my last several laptops and had pretty solid solid comercial app support. The 3com card should be easy - I keep one of those around because *everything* seemed to detect and install drivers into it.

    On my main dev box I've come to like Gentoo. Note, I start from stage 3 builds - not the hard core .02% faster stage 1 builds. Easier to deal with source based updates over the long term. Got burned bad by the RPM thing and this keeps me free to go where ever.

    The Centos stuf
    • And if you do the open SuSE, better to grab the 10.2 dev build. (http://en.opensuse.org/Development_Version)
  • I'd wait a few weeks and go to Fedora Core 6. That's my plan as well, Mandriva has disappointed me, and I hate Ubuntu.
  • exagerating slightly here but, that card is in about half the PCI PC's on the planet. If you're making a new network capable OS that's pretty much the first card you write a driver for.

    • Exactly, I have several around, just in case....

    • And yet, I read in the Linux HOWTO docs, that the 3Com cards (especially the 3C905 series) seem to require more effort to get working then just about any other NIC out there. But, I didn't actually try, I was just reading the docs. Maybe it's not has hard as the HOWTO made it sound.
      • Mandrake 8, FC1-4, FreeBSD 4-6 and Debian 3.1 have had no issues with mine over the years, auotdetected and all that jazz.
        • I tried to get it working with Mandrake 9.2 just a day or so before the hard drive failure and it totally failed to autodetect.
          Had to manually set options in modules.conf, only the HOWTO docs fail to mention all the parameters that need to be specified (or how to figure out what values that should be set to - what IRQ should I use? No idea...), so I never did get it working, and then the hard drive failed, making it a moot point anyways.

          I'm sure if I had internet access on hand at that moment I could have
    • Oh, and I don't know if this is true of all 3c950c cards, but it's an EISA card.
      If that matters...

  • Basically, I won't use anything but Debian or RedHat ES.

    RedHat ES (or CentOS, or WhiteBox linux... the clones) is well supported by lots of stuff. Otherwise, I don't like it.

    Debian is overall as well supported as anything else, and it's a bit of a pain to set up initially, but anything will work on it (it's usually on someone's APT repository, or it's easily installed after a short compile).

    (K)Ubuntu is just another Debian (between Debian testing and Debian Unstable, typically), with a lot of coo

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ces ( 119879 )
      These days I'm down to two Linux flavor families:
      Debian and (K)Ubuntu
      SuSE and OpenSuSE

      I'll use CentOS or Fedora but only if there is no other supported way to get something to run for production use.

      I've just been bitten too badly by Red Hat and their clones in the past.

      I might give Gentoo a go again but only as a VMware image or on a 'toy' system since I've no desire to attempt to maintain one in production use.

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