Lately I have been trying to set up my workstation to do some
development on. I just finished my first real programming class and
with a month off, would like to get some practice in. I have been
driving myself nuts trying to get what I want.
I am looking for a distro that has up to date packages, with a package
management system that works much like apt-get or portage (definately
with the option of binary installation though). Other than that, I
would prefer an option for internet installation (as I have wasted lots
of cds trying to burn good copies of fedora) and of course a good
environment for development.
So far I have tried these:
Fedora: Cant seen to get a good set of cds... have only really gotten
the first cd done well, which leaves me installing everything with yum,
which I couldn't seem to do. I kept getting a lot of broken packages.
Slackware: The only internet install tool I found for it was
slapt-get, which was really ugly. It flat out refused to install
many
packages for me. I might give it another go again soon, as I have
gotten much better with apt-get since then.
Debian: Isn't quite current as I like, even with sid (I use gaim to
check this. Sid version of gaim is 0.72 and latest is 0.74). I am
also having problems setting up my dual head matrox. It doesnt like
xinerama.
Gentoo: I love gentoo. My box does not. It likes to freeze up
(nothing moves, cant ssh in, and the led lights are blinking at me)
if
I try to install anything remotely large from source. This doesn't
always happen, but so far its only happened under gentoo. My computer
randomly lost power under Fedora though. Its probably a hardware
problem, and unrelated to the distro. Gentoo also has no simple way of
installing binary files, understandably.
As far as Mandrake and SuSE go, I have never really liked either. I
haven't really used either in long time as well. SuSE always seemed to
run really slow (It kept installing the bigmem smp 4g userspace kernel
or something), and I just never really liked Mandrake for no good
reason. Maybe its their mascot... or thier super pretty installer.
Isnt't it French (Still no good reason).
There are also the BSDs, but thats my backup plan.
Any suggestions?
