On 6 September 2016 at 13:45, Dima Pasechnik <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi David, > > > On Tuesday, September 6, 2016 at 9:08:25 AM UTC, Dr. David Kirkby (Kirkby > Microwave Ltd) wrote: >> >> I'm trying to migrate away from Solaris to Linux, given the takeover by >> Oracle. I decided to install the latest Debian (8.5 == Jessie) , and Sage. >> I have not succeeded yet, but some of the issues seem to be ones where the >> installation could be made easier for popular linux distributions. >> >> > with your Unix knowledge you'd feel Debian is a jail of sorts; I'd > recommend Arch. > Hi Dima Why do you say Debian is a jail of sorts? I'm looking for a distribution, that perhaps does not exist * Reasonably well set up for things like propriety video drivers (my Nvidia FX3800 seems to present a few hassles for any distribution) . I tried Mint, and quite looked the front end and the fact it installed drivers for my hardware. I like open-source, but when closed-source hardware drivers are better, I will use them. * Be reasonably flexible I'm not sure how this will work on Mint, but I read something on a Scientific Linux mailing list which made me think Mint was a poor choice. The comment there was that the Mint forums were more "enthusiastic hobbyists, and not professionals". As you know, I'm pretty decent at Unix, having long since used Solaris, and having also used AIX, HP-UX etc. I think its fair to say I would probably need help with more complex things, that maybe "enthusiastic hobbyists" would not be sufficiently competent. * I don't want to keep re-installing operating systems regularly. I have not updated my Solaris distribution for about 7 years. I run a business and want a computer that works - not one I am going to have to spend all my time maintaining. In fact, my only real reason for ditching Solaris now is that one of my SPARC machines is being unreliable with perplexing hardware errors. Since I use that for data collection from test equipment, I want to move the GPIB card that collects the data to a more modern machine, which should be more reliable. I have Centros on a couple of IBM servers which I have not used for the last year or so. My reason for going to Centros was that I had some commercial software that was supported only on Redhat. I did work on Centros, whereas any other distribution was likely to lead to issues. One thing I do want to do is video editing. Blender seems to be the best software for that. Dave -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
