On Tue, 24 Jun 2008 21:59:32 -0400, David Hardy wrote: > Serious question: favorite new Linux distro? Which will do media > and amaze and stun the otherwise Winders crowd at various sites of > various sizes? Anything from desktop to enterprise level.
Mandriva 2008.1 Spring PowerPack. Includes non-free (AIS & AIB) bits such as ATI & NVidia drivers, Cedega, and Fluendo multimedia codecs. Provides KDE *and* Gnome *and* XFCE (as well as IceWM, Fluxbox and several other WMs), so if you prefer one DE over the others, chances are that it's in there. While Mandr{ake,iva}'s default orientation has always been KDE, unlike some other distros I've seen they do not IMHO give short shrift to the other DEs in their implementations of them. The 2008.1 Free edition contains only free (AIS&B) packages on the install media, so no proprietary drivers "out of the box", but the non-free (AIS, not AIB) bits can be easily added post-install from the distro's official "non-free" repositories. A good single-page rundown on all of the 2008.1 versions, the repos, and on what distinguishes Mandriva from most other distros is the 2008.1 Reviewers Guide: http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/2008.1_Reviewers_Guide The various Mandriva One 2008.1 live CDs - of which there are several, because each contains one DE and a subset of the supported languages available - also provide the ATI & NVidia proprietary drivers, as well as OOo, Firefox, the GIMP, Java and Flash plugins, and a selection of apps that is appropriate for that DE (i.e. Kontact on the KDE ones, but Evolution & Pidgin on the Gnome ones). The main shortcoming of the One CDs, IMHO, is an almost complete lack of games in the live environment; this may or may not matter to you, depending on your audience(s). Just my $0.02USD ... -- Bill Mullen RLU #270075 _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/