Ubuntu? Wow, unless OpenSUSE grabbed me by the head and punched me I wouldn't touch Ubuntu again. It's just Debian with a little bit different installer, a pain in the butt on root accounts becaue it wants to try something different, which is cool and all but makes learning UNIX harder for a newbie, and some slightly newer packages than Debian.
I'll stick with these: Open SUSE, Slackware (Which we should all know, is what SUSE came from, it was just a German release of Slackware) and FreeBSD (which Slackware, again, is related to in a way). I also use XP Home, I gave it a little partition on my laptop and main desktop to play a few games where Linux still lacks, but is getting there faster and faster every year. I put Ubuntu on my test machine for a while to see why everyone went on and on about it, and didn't think it was more special than anything I already have, so I didn't stick with it, I did however give it a fair chance, and thought hey this has potential, so I left it on to test and just dual booted my test box with Slackware and Ubuntu. After like a week I removed it after realizing it wasn't anything better than Slackware or FreeBSD or SUSE / OpenSUSE. I've been a supporter of SUSE and it would take quite a lot for me to stop. When I got my first computer in late 1999, about a year later I hear about this Linux thing and wanted to learn more about it, so I looked into it. I thought Linux was awesome but I couldn't ever get online. My little crappy piece of crap soundcard / modem combo card wasn't supported at the time and all I had was dial up and of course no sound because it was a crap card. eventually I got high speed / cable and tried again with Mandrake 7.1 which was already old at the time, and still couldn't get online or get sound, so I'd once in a while reboot into Linux just to toy with it and learn about it. Well, right before SUSE 8.2 was released, it was December and I was at Best Buy doing some shopping and I wanted to pick up a newer version of Linux, so I was looking around and saw Mandrake on the shelf and SUSE. I hadn't heard of SUSE before and I knew what Mandrake was. The box was SUSE 8.1 Professional was so big and I wanted to know what could possibly be in there. So eventually I decided OK, I can't afford both because I'm also buying Partition Magic, so after walking around the store for an hour ro so I decided OK, I'm going to see what's in this huge box, and grabbed SUSE 8.1 Professional. I got in the car and we had to stop somewhere else on the way home. I stayed in the car watching the snow fall and couldn't take it anymore and opened it up. I looked inside and saw these stickers and thought "OK yea they're just stickers but damn that's cool!" and the big books it came with full if information and help and done VERY well, and this CD case that put the others to shame. I went home and started reading the books and thought "wow, these are actually good, these guys and girls at SUSE actually know how to write and make it easy to read without being boring, and they don't make this as a novelty, they make this as a way to use it as your only OS and how to make all that hardware actually work".. I eventually in early January, installed it. I hadn't seen an installer work so well before, and when I rebooted and loaded it up I was amazed how nice it looked. I opened a shell up and tried to ping expecting nothing because after all, no other version ever let me online, why would it? It didn't ping of course and I had forgotten to check something, and I'm like OK I'll check the card real quick but I doubt I'll get online... I realized I had made a mistake in the typing and tried again and to my amazement, I was able to ping. I was online with Linux for the very first time ever.... I was smiling, I could finally talk to my friends WHILE using Linux instead of having to reboot to get online in Windows 98 SE, and I was just so shocked it actually worked. I of course couldn't get sound working so I took the computer into Best Buy and had them install a Sound Blaster card, and boom I had sound. After that, I was hooked. I mean it's the distro that got me using Linux as more than just something to look at and show my cousin who thought it looked awesome, I could actually get online. From there, I became a HUGE SUSE fan boy, I mean this distro got me online, and I didn't even have to do anything! No messing with drivers, no nothing, and I had sound! So I reinstalled, gave a bigger partition to SUSE and more and more I stopped booting up Windows. When SUSE 8.2 Professional came out I went out that week and bought it, and again, told everyone else to buy it who used Linux. I still remember sitting on my computer at 5 AM not sleeping because I was finally online with Linux playing a CD and started learning how YAST2 worked and how amazed I was with what it could do compared to what I was used to. So needless to say, I learned Linux and UNIX on SUSE, wrote documentation for AntiOnline to show others you don't have to do all this configuration crap by hand and that plugging in a piece of hardware doesn't mean editing a file to make it work. And that just plugging something in, made it work. I know this is getting long but that's why I won't leave. It's the one distro I could count on to work out of the box. I'm typing this from my laptop where I can't get half the distros to work properly on it without tweaking. It's running OpenSUSE 10.2, no problems at all, and with the help of some people on this list I figured out a few small problems, and I just recorded my new album using it. My album took some hard work and A lot of my time, but I did it all myself, on OpenSUSE 10.2, with nothing but LMMS and vkeyboard. If you want to check it out look here: http://www.myspace.com/farmacyofhorror All that music was made on this laptop with OpenSUSE 10.2 and LMMS and another synth you can download from the repos on OpenSUSE, and a wave editor to splice a wav into the begining of one of the songs, all GPL software, and I made a full album with it. I burned the first 10 copies of it on Halloween and sell it for 7 dollars and once I have a paypal up I'll be selling it over the net so people can download it instead. So, thank you SUSE. -Allen -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
