On Thursday, June 07, 2012 11:21:22, Adam wrote: > Adam wrote: > > What distros do you use, and why did you choose them? What are their > > biggest advantages and disadvantages? Are there any distros you've > > tried but chosen not to use? What made them a "bad fit" for you? I'd > > be very grateful if any of you would share your experiences with > > various distros. > > Thanks VERY much, Dave, Bob, Chris, Aram, Eric, Matthias, and Allen, for > your very helpful recommendation and an interesting discussion. I was > also surprised to see that other users here are considering changing > distros. Maybe a future meeting could be another "distro shootout".
We had a small bit of that within the Desktop Environment shootout a couple of months back, although that wasn't the focus. > I've repartitioned my internal HD so I now have four additional 20 GB > partitions for trying other distros in addition to my "production" > system. I decided to start with distros similar to Mandriva. Right now > I have the latest releases of Mandriva, Mageiea, PCLinuxOS, and openSUSE > installed. I'm trying them "in parallel", so now all have all updates, > and an ordinary user can start the GUI. I'll mention this even though I'm not necessarily suggesting it -- sometimes it's possible to use a shared "test" /home partition and a single swap partition across several distributions. A shared /home partition can work where the software used is of similar version levels. An example of where this becomes strange is if the /home partition was installed by Ubuntu which uses AppArmor, but then the same /home partition is used by Fedora which expects files to have extended attributes for use with SELinux which are now missing. [It's sometimes possible to add the extended attributes later, and they may or may not be necessary for /home depending on the SELinux policy being used.] > This last required "chmod 4755 usr/bin/Xorg" on some of those distros. > (An install of the "KDE Full Monty" version of PCLinuxOS took up 14 GB, > so I replaced that with their "Phoenix" (XFCE4) edition, which takes up > a more reasonable 2.4 GB.) My next step will be to see whether I can > get my wireless card to work, as once I get my next system, this box > will get moved into another room. I tend to install particular KDE4 components rather than the whole thing for the same reason -- otherwise it's too big and there are too many compoents that I'd never use. It's more work to install KDE4 as components because you must know the components you really need, and that isn't straightforward IMHO. > So far, I don't have any conclusions about any of the four distros I've > installed. Based on recommendations, I also have the latest Debian, > Arch, Slackware, and CrunchBang (couldn't resist the name) burned to > disc and next in line to be tried out. I'll post any observations, > conclusions, or decisions to this thread. I mentioned that the differences between distributions can be subtle. As an example, the filesystem backing the /tmp directory is sometimes different verses the /var/tmp directory. /var/tmp is usually stored directly to disk, but some distributions mount /tmp as a tmpfs filesystem instead, which is a ramdisk that is backed by swap rather than a direct disk-based filesystem. The benefit is that tmpfs is very fast, but a drawback is that using it effectively limits the storage size of /tmp to whatever size the tmpfs ramdisk size limit has been set to. There are some nonobvious limitations that come up as a result, such as the file size that the 'sort' command can deal with. Debian wheezy/testing and sid/unstable (but not squeeze/stable) currently default to using a tmpfs filesystem for /tmp, which is based on the RAMTMP setting of "yes" by default in /etc/rcS.d/S01mountkernfs.sh, though this may default to "no" soon. There's a good chance Ubuntu, Linux Mint, and other distributions based on Debian also use tmpfs for /tmp. [And being that Debian squeeze/stable does /not/ default to using tmpfs for /tmp, this is even a subtlety in different versions of the /same/ distribution. :-P] -- Chris -- Chris Knadle [email protected] _______________________________________________ Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) Vassar College Jul 11 - Mad Science Fair - Open Hardware Expo Aug 1 - Pimp My Network Sep 5 - OpenStack
