Hi Matt, Have you considered Mepis? It is Debian based and the most recent build is pretty bleeding edge. With apt-get, you can take it all the way up through unstable if you are that brave. It has EXCELLENT hardware detection (alm0st as good as Xandros). To implement the dual heads, I copied my XF86Config-4 file from my Xandros installation to /etc/X11 on the Mepis partition, rebotted the machine and both heads were working. All I had to do was change the resolution and restart x. And finally, it is FREE!. If you don't want to mess with downloading, I have the iso files of the latest build on my machine at home and would be glad to burn a set for you. If you can live with the August 10th build, there is a set in the LUG library.
I hope this helps. Ed Richards -----Original Message----- From: Mat Branyon [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, December 11, 2003 1:37 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [brlug-general] what distro does everyone use for development? 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? _______________________________________________ General mailing list [email protected] http://brlug.net/mailman/listinfo/general_brlug.net This email, including any attached files, may contain confidential and privileged information. Any review, use, distribution or disclosure of included information by unintended recipients is strictly prohibited. If you are not a named recipient or authorized to receive and / or act on information sent to a named recipient, or have reason to believe you are not or should not be one of the named recipients, please notify sender accordingly by reply email and delete all copies of this message prior to forwarding, copying or otherwise reproducing this message or attachments thereto. For information regarding the export control status of items discussed in this document, please refer to the project control list. Thank you.
