On March 17, 2006 05:14, Paul wrote: > > Me I'm not interested in financially supporting just another Distro > > vendor along the lines of RH and Novell. > > I think I am going to testdrive Ubuntu and OpenSuse on a spare disk... > > Paul
I gave Kubuntu (I'm a KDE kinda guy) 5.10 a try before PCLinuxOS, and wasn't impressed: 1. The installer seemed to hang every time I tried it, until I went into advanced mode and discovered what was going on. The disk is targetted at a number of repository mirrors that apparently no longer exist. It waits 15 minutes to time out each repository. In total, you have to wait about 2 hours to let the installer finish. Couldn't find any way, even in advanced mode, to skip this step. 2. It crashed on my every couple of hours, even after getting the repositories correctly configured, and everything upgraded to latest versions. Usually it was just X or KDE crashing, and it would take me back to login prompt (but lose all my work in progress), but various other things went wrong as well. 3. I gave up after 3 hours of trying to install the nvidia driver. On Mandriva, when I "urpmi kernel-source", I get source set up ready to use for something like an nvidia driver build. On Kubuntu, when I "apt-get kernel-source", I just get a raw bz2 tarball. I had to unpack it, configure it, and build it, just to get the version headers created that the nvidia driver needed. Oh, and to do this, I had to install gcc (but not the current version available, had to retrieve an older version), the maketools, and so on. Oh yeah, the only non-X run-level they have set up is failsafe; all run levels from 2 to 5 are identical, and all start X. Nothing equivalent to Mandriva's run level 3. I had to create my own run level (removed X from run level 2) to even be able to run the nvidia installer. Never did manage to get the nvidia driver to buld, so I was stuck with no 3d acceleration. That's about the time I gave up and tried PCLinuxOS, which incidentally had the best handling of graphics cards: there are four different iso's available, one for older nvidia cards, one for newer ones (because the newest nvidia drivers work better for newer cards, but drop support for older ones), one for supported ati cards, and a vanilla (no 3d acceleration) one. Just pick the iso for the type of card you have, install it, and you have 3d acceleration out of the box (well, if you have one of the wide variety of supported 3d cards). But don't let me dissuade you from anything. Ubuntu 6.04 should be out soon, and perhaps will address some of these problems. I'd be particularly interested in hearing your experience with OpenSuse. I watched their xgl demo video (http://www.novell.com/linux/xglrelease/), and it's pretty cool. -- Ron (ronhd at users dot sourceforge dot net) Opinions expressed here are all mine ____________________________________________________ Want to buy your Pack or Services from Mandriva? Go to http://store.mandriva.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrivaclub.com ____________________________________________________
