December 5, 2003

This Tux’s for you

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…

Filed under: Technology

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  • http://www.holovaty.com/ Adrian Holovaty

    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?

  • http://www.heisel.org Chris Heisel

    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.