What Distro To Use For My System?

[Old_Biker_John]

Hi all,

I notice that many of the links in the 'Distro Links' starter thread show what distros members are using on their machines.

This raises three related questions in my 'Linux-newbie' mind as I try to choose a suitable distro for the system in my sig : -

1. What distro(s) do you use?

2. What is the spec. for each system used?

3. Are there any known compatability problems?

Your advice would be appreciated.

John.

[graham.myers]

I went with what I knew. As an Oracle dba I use Red Hat Linux quite a bit so I opted for the free deriative - fedora. I like it, the gui is good and its not too complicated to set up with a lot of good forum type help.

I use it on a microATX board (Intel S775) with a dual core intel chip. I run the 32-bit distro. It has 2gb of memory, runs off a mirrored IDE 40gb hard drive (only 1 IDE port on the motherboard so external DVD). It has 6 sata ports so I have a raid 5 array of 6x 500gb disks - 2.5tb. Excluding disks, cost around £135 to build

I went straight away with filling the raid array as I wasnt confident that if I added another couple of drives later on the actual device path wouldn't change for the disks I had thus destrying the array associations. I'm using a software mirror built into the distro rather than the onboard hardware raid as that would only allow 4 disks in a single array so I'd have to have 2x3disk arrays wasting 500gb.

fantastic box, lives in a mini tower case in my cinema room and servers as a security camera system (ZoneMinder), uPnP server (TwonkyVision), iTunes alac server (FireFly), bittorrent (MLDonkey) and a nas (Samba). More probably to come

[springtide]

Originally Posted by graham.myers

..
..
It has 6 sata ports so I have a raid 5 array of 6x 500gb disks - 2.5tb. Excluding disks, cost around £135 to build
..
I'm using a software mirror built into the distro rather than the onboard hardware raid as that would only allow 4 disks in a single array so I'd have to have 2x3disk arrays wasting 500gb.
..

Personally I would have opted for 2x 2+1 RAID5 volumes for the extra protection, unless of course you are backing up the 2.5TB. A RAID5 5+1 IMO is stretching it a little wrt redundancy.

Another tip when building raid arrays at home, is to make the volumes for the array a little bit smaller than the disk (not sure if you did this), so that if one fails and you can#t get another identical disk, you'll not need to orry if the new disk is slightly smaller.

I also wouldn't worry about the device paths changing. if ths happens, you can just delete and recreate the VGs and LVMs etc as they were, and your filesystem will still be intact ! I've done this on HP-UX and Solaris, so assume it is very similar on Linux. Device paths always change, so is something to learn how to do before putting lots of data on the array!

Anyway, sounds like you are having lots of fun!!!

[Old_Biker_John]

Originally Posted by graham.myers

I went with what I knew. As an Oracle dba I use Red Hat Linux quite a bit so I opted for the free deriative - fedora. I like it, the gui is good and its not too complicated to set up with a lot of good forum type help.

I haven't looked at Fedora recently. Tried to use it a couple of years ago when I first thought of Linux, but found it a bit hard to get into then (no LiveCD's at that time).

Maybe I'll have a fresh look. I seems that a new distro (Fedora 9) is about to appear, so I'll probably see what the beta reviews say about that.

I like the sound of your system's cost. What mobo did you base it on?

Seems to be very capable.

Thanks for your suggestion.

John.

[RRB]

Originally Posted by Old_Biker_John

Hi all,

I notice that many of the links in the 'Distro Links' starter thread show what distros members are using on their machines.

This raises three related questions in my 'Linux-newbie' mind as I try to choose a suitable distro for the system in my sig : -

1. What distro(s) do you use?

2. What is the spec. for each system used?

3. Are there any known compatability problems?

Your advice would be appreciated.

John.

1. Gentoo

2. Installed on a Dell XPS M1710 Laptop

3. Everything works fine with it.

I have installed other distros on the laptop too and never had issues with any of them not supporting the hardware.

[graham.myers]

Originally Posted by Old_Biker_John

What mobo did you base it on?

It was an intel s775 MicroATX board similar to this one - http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...oductID=518644
and I put a dual core intel chip in it - a dual core s775 pentium 1.6ghz - like this one http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...oductID=600158

Memory was bought of a collegue at work for £20, case was from scan too for about £22

[MarvTheRobot]

TBH, this is a question that pops up nearly everywhere you go, and a lot of the time the thread goes on and on and on.....

Everyone has their preference, the best way to find out is (Bandwidth permitting) download a few liveCD's and give them a go.
I started with (K)ubuntu 'coz a guy at work put me onto it, I then tried a few more; Suse, Fedora, Red-Hat, Slax and ended up with Ubuntu 8.04 x64 this time and have stuck with it.

As for hardware support, best thing to do is check the Wiki/Forum for each Distro you are interested in, most will have a HCL somewhere - Or just try and see it's up to you. The bigger distro's have quite good support if you run into problems.

Hope this helps a little.

[Old_Biker_John]

Originally Posted by MarvTheRobot

Everyone has their preference, the best way to find out is (Bandwidth permitting) download a few liveCD's and give them a go.
I started with (K)ubuntu 'coz a guy at work put me onto it, I then tried a few more; Suse, Fedora, Red-Hat, Slax and ended up with Ubuntu 8.04 x64 this time and have stuck with it.

As for hardware support, best thing to do is check the Wiki/Forum for each Distro you are interested in, most will have a HCL somewhere - Or just try and see it's up to you. The bigger distro's have quite good support if you run into problems.

Hope this helps a little.

Hi everyone,

Thanks for your opinions on my question. I quoted MarvTheRobot because the post seemed to summarise most contributions.

I have spent the last few days downloading LiveCD's and trying them out on the system in my sig.

So far I have successfully tried Ubuntu, Pioneer (a flavour of Ubunto), Kubuntu, Mandriva Powerpack 2008, PCLinuxOS Gnome 2008, Granular Funworks 2007 and 1.0 [Preview] (another PCLOS derivative), DreamLinux 3.0, Zenwalk 5.0 and Bluewhite64.

Due to my SATA DVD/RW not being recognised by their OS booting files, I was unable to try Gentoo, Sabayon Linux Pro, Fedora 7 & 8, Arch Linux (KDE or XFCE) and MEPIS 64.

Obviously, I have done nothing else for the last 5 days!

My broadband account has taken quite a hit as well!

I will try Ubuntu 8.04 when it is finalised, but so far, I am quite impressed with PCLinuxOS Gnome 2008, DreamLinux 3.0 and Bluewhite64.

Hopefully I will soon be able to choose a suitable distro to allow me to escape from my Windows straitjacket. I may even attempt a multi-boot Linux system to ensure coverage of all my preferences.

Thanks again for all your help guys.

[RRB]

Originally Posted by Old_Biker_John

Hi everyone,

Thanks for your opinions on my question. I quoted MarvTheRobot because the post seemed to summarise most contributions.

I have spent the last few days downloading LiveCD's and trying them out on the system in my sig.

So far I have successfully tried Ubuntu, Pioneer (a flavour of Ubunto), Kubuntu, Mandriva Powerpack 2008, PCLinuxOS Gnome 2008, Granular Funworks 2007 and 1.0 [Preview] (another PCLOS derivative), DreamLinux 3.0, Zenwalk 5.0 and Bluewhite64.

Due to my SATA DVD/RW not being recognised by their OS booting files, I was unable to try Gentoo, Sabayon Linux Pro, Fedora 7 & 8, Arch Linux (KDE or XFCE) and MEPIS 64.

Obviously, I have done nothing else for the last 5 days!

My broadband account has taken quite a hit as well!

I will try Ubuntu 8.04 when it is finalised, but so far, I am quite impressed with PCLinuxOS Gnome 2008, DreamLinux 3.0 and Bluewhite64.

Hopefully I will soon be able to choose a suitable distro to allow me to escape from my Windows straitjacket. I may even attempt a multi-boot Linux system to ensure coverage of all my preferences.

Thanks again for all your help guys.

Ideally you want one that has a decent sized community. Debian based like the *buntus has a large community and getting help is very good. Gentoo has a superb community too but if you are new to linux, as much as i praise and use Gentoo myself i wouldnt recommend it for you unless yo like a real challenge have have plenty free time. Have a look at opensuse too if you havent already, i tried it a while back and its actually a very polished distro. You are doing the right thing though trying out a few different ones for yourself. If someone had a gun to my head forcing me away from Gentoo id probably be using a Debian based distro now but for me Gentoo is the most flexible distro out there, i just couldnt see me ever moving to another distro now.

[Chrisoldinho]

Another Ubuntu fan although I do like YDL purely because "yum" is great.

Not sure if Ubuntu has a "yum" style program?

Can't wait to try out 8.04

[Ikki]

I would recommend a debian based distro (though not Debian itself) like linux Mint which comes with almost everything ready installed out of the box.

[Old_Biker_John]

Originally Posted by Ikki

I would recommend a debian based distro (though not Debian itself) like linux Mint which comes with almost everything ready installed out of the box.

Hi Ikki,

I tried Linux Mint a while ago (version 3.0 Xfce), but couldn't boot the LiveCD on any of my systems (MD5 was correct and I tried multiple burns of .iso which all reported verification of burned data!).

However, I see that version 4.0 is now available, so I will give it another try.

Thanks for your suggestion.

John.