The Linux Distro Thread (maybe)

[ej-solutions]

Thought I'd start this one off, rather than continue on another thread.

As a quick catch up for others:

Have a look at Unetbootin, as a means to try out different versions of Linux, without producing numerous coasters (unwanted CDs).
I haven't tried the method of installing to hard drive, only the USB flash drive method (so far).

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Just skimming the surface

Opinions/guidance expressed are intended to benefit the reader (mostly) but no responsibility should be assumed for the accuracy and no warranty is implied/expressed or given - so eBay may pull this post

[otherego]

I have absolutely no problem with the principle of sending a few quid to the magnificent folk who provide free software on a "whenever I can afford it" basis. I'm immensely grateful for all the great stuff they provide at no compulsory cost to me.

With ad-blocking becoming more widespread - and I block ads, make no mistake - I wonder whether we're going to find less and less available for nothing.

One of the main reasons I block as much as possible is that I'm a bit of a privacy nut. I absolutely hate giving an e-mail address in order to install an anti-virus, for instance. Some will sympathise, some will find this totally over the top.

But it's slowly dawned on my sluggish mind that there's already far too much information about me "out there" and out of my control. I assume much of the information gathering on the web is driven by the marketing industry's appetite for personal data.

A bit of a disappointment to come across this on such a terrific site as distrowatch:

http://distrowatch.tradepub.com/free/w_make07/prgm.cgi

Bizarrely, the Linux Guide offered is aimed at the business market .

This offer will be sent to your business email address entered above.

Useful for those of us between jobs, retired or otherwise unable to honestly provide the details demanded.

Complete and verifiable information is required in order to receive this Guide.

In which case I definitely won't bother, thanks. As I say, there's already far too much of my information already out of my hands.

It really is beginning to look as if we're moving to the end of some sort of a Golden Age of the internet.

Tricky - I understand the need for sites to fund themselves. I even tolerate some ads on trusted sites which are not in-your-face or "look at me, look at me." But I'm not offering my information any more.

And it's very worrying to find that information so aggressively demanded on a site linked to one of the top open-source sites.

Never mind. Time for a beer, and then I'll stop grizzling!

[otherego]

Strolls back in, suitably refreshed.

Notices that Sabayon 5.2 is still downloading - envies those with swift broadband connections.

Takes horrified look at thread number.

OE is irrationally superstitious about one number, and only one.

Hopes more sensible Linux cognoscenti are kind enough to make at least another five posts, and preferably more...

Back to the potential end of free as in free beer - anyone else noticed what Oracle is up to with Solaris?

I can't help wondering whether previously-expressed fears here about OpenOffice, now that it's in the hands of Oracle, might not prove soundly founded. Lets hope go-office keeps - um - going.

[otherego]

Sabayon takes ages to download with my max 2mb broadband.

It plays Rock n Roll Hall of Fame while the live DVD loads.

Er ... groovy.

I'm going to bed.

[grumpy-cook]

I absolutely hate giving an e-mail address in order to install an anti-virus, for instance.

That's what "disposable" email addresses are for OE. I have a couple of Gmail ones for such things.

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[otherego]

Yes, I tend to use spare addresses for this sort of thing. Trouble is, one still tends to give the webmail provider all sorts of personal info while signing up.

Wonder whether it's illegal to fib?

I'm typing this from a Sabayon live DVD session - very impressed, so far.

If anyone gives it a try and finds that their laptop number lock is on and ignores efforts to turn it off, go into the keyboard settings and replace the default "generic" keyboard with something closer to your actual computer - really threw me for a while.

On a Thinkpad T23 with a 1.13 ghz CPU and souped-up to 512mb of RAM, I think it's the fastest-responding live disc (other than Slitaz, DSL and Puppy which I think "cheat" by loading themselves entirely into RAM) that I've tried yet.

Efficient use of hardware, too - it was using 259mb of RAM with Firefox, Writer and the System Monitor running.

Be interesting to see how it copes on other machines, but it really does look most promising. I've also suspected anything Gentoo-based of being difficult, for some reason, but this is great.

Not quite sure exactly what their motto means, though:

as easy as an abacus, as fast as a segway

Okaaay...

[grumpy-cook]

Let me know how you get on with Sabayon please OE. It's one of the distros I have been looking at, but I've not got round to downloading it yet.

I've thrown together a sort of testbed PC from bits to try various distros on. It's running PC/OS (Gnome) at present, but I've been a bit short of time to play around.

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[blackburn_stevie]

Don't say that I never help out on this forum. :^O

If 'arriss holes could fly, the RT would be an airport :^O

[otherego]

Devilish kind of you, sir! (What is "the RT" - purely out of curiosity?)

Treat yourself to a download of Sabayon's latest - most impressive, and it'd be interesting to hear how it runs on more modern equipment.

Annoyingly, I can't get it running on VirtualBox - time to get VirtualBox onto a computer with a little more RAM, I think - or on a T22 with 256mb of RAM. In all fairness, the Sabayon site does say it needs at least 512mb.

Although the Sabayon live CD runs very "economically" where RAM is concerned, it does seem to need at least half a gig in order to get itself started. On an elderly Thinkpad T23, everything just worked straight away - including wireless, which on that machine relies on a Belkin PCMCIA card.

It's a 1.6gb download. I'm wondering whether it runs so fast because it needs to unpack less into RAM than most live CDs. Can't really afford yet another old laptop at the moment, so it might be time to bin an existing installation in order to actually install Sabayon - and see how much faster that is than the live DVD.

None of that product activation nonsense to worry about on repeated installations, after all.

I've been messing about with the Gnome edition, but hope to download the KDE - when I think to do so less than two hours before retiring for the night. Takes ages on my "up to 2mb" connection.

I'll play a bit more with it tomorrow, hopefully, and see whether I find anything to dislike...

[blackburn_stevie]

otherego .... I'd love to help out but as you may have noticed, I just sold the 2 laptops that I may have tried new distros on. Now, I could be wrong here but I don't think 'er indoors would be best pleased if I started messing around with HER PC. That's the kind of thing that can make you pee sitting down in future, lol

If 'arriss holes could fly, the RT would be an airport :^O

[otherego]

This really is very, very nice indeed. My current favourite – Mint – is definitely facing competition now.

Just for the heck of it, I'm going to try writing this in OpenOffice (version 3.2, which is nice) and then copying and pasting it to the thread. Apologies in advance if anything strange happens.

I'm now running the Sabayon 5.2 live DVD on the trusty old Dell desktop – 2.0ghz CPU and 1 gb of RAM – and to be honest, it's really not much slower than Mint, which is installed. At the moment the system monitor shows about 25% CPU use and 278mb of memory in use. That's with Firefox running, plus OpenOffice Writer and the system monitor.

With this amount of RAM, it was a simple matter to import all my Firefox bookmarks via a USB flash drive, and took only a couple of minutes to install the usual four add-ons.

Bear in mind that this is all running within that 278mb of memory in use.

http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=sabayon

gives a useful list of what's included. Looks like it's still using GRUB 1 (1.98?) - I read somewhere that this is still easier with three or more distros/operating systems installed. Must say, GRUB 2 on Mint 8 was nice once I worked out that all that was needed to include Windoze in the system was a GRUB update – after ages trying to figure out just what was happening. Wish I were brighter.

It has something called the XBMC Media Centre. I have absolutely no idea what to do with it, but it really does look awfully polished, whatever it is – looks, as per its name like a centralised app for handling all one's media...

Still – enough pre bed-time playing. And I am not going to get trapped into trying out the World of Goo demo... am I?

Ha - and it copied and pasted fine from Writer.

Steve - I quite understand your fears. As a lifelong bachelor, I've always managed to get to the terminally terrified stage before actually marrying the dragons. Oops - I mean gentle little cooing doves.

[*scyllabub*]

Did Stevie define "RT"? I reckon he's insulting the Round Table participants :^O

Stevie, did you used to be someone else?

It must be time for my nap :|

[repairexpert]

You can use the same tin hat that you use for Q&A if you ever feel like visiting RT. ;)

[grumpy-cook]

Scylla, Stevie is aka the infamous Old Guy. He changed his ID immediately after Otherego published his "Computing Diary of an Old Guy".

:^O

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[blackburn_stevie]

*scyllabub* ..... The RT that I mentioned earlier is the "Round Table" eBay discussion forum. It's where I normally hang out and is more for everyday topics that techie stuff.

Did I used to be somebody else?
Yes I did. Grumps nailed it when he said that I used to be *old_guy* but before that I was known as geordie_the_parrot for many years and last but not least, I was hen_pecked when I first signed in to eBay back in 2001

If 'arriss holes could fly, the RT would be an airport :^O

[otherego]

Bah. Just when everything was looking good, I find that Sabayon hogs disc space - I was hoping to give it a whirl on the Eee PC. Hard to be sure, but various reviews suggest that a full installation uses about 6.5gb of hard drive territory.

Almost out-Vistas Vista! But at least it won't fill a further 15% of the drive with restore points and so on. And it packs an awful lot of stuff - some of which could probably be pared during installation - ?

I was hen_pecked ... one somehow suspects Mrs Blunder to be a paragon of patience and toleration!

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Exits, pursued by a flung Fujitsu...

[blackburn_stevie]

otherego ..... Let's just say that she is from Motherwell and leave it at that. :^O

If 'arriss holes could fly, the RT would be an airport :^O

[grumpy-cook]

Well I've got Sabayon installed on my test box. I must say that I'm impressed so far, a nice distro. I'm having fun with an old Dlink wireless PCI card that I had lying around and stuck in at the moment. I want to see how it handles Virtualbox next. If that's ok it will be in the running for my main PC. My aim is to get rid of my dual-boot XP, which I hardly use now, and just have XP in VB on a single Linux system for when I need it to try things out on.

Here's a lightweight distro for OE to have a look at. Salix (Slackware based) - http://www.salixos.org/

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[grumpy-cook]

Tut, tut, what's this doing on page 3.

If anyone is interested, having tried out PC/OS, Sabayon and PCLinuxOS I eventually decided on the latter. I liked Sabayon, but it became evident to me that there was rather more style than substance. For instance I just couldn't get the old PCI wireless card to work, whereas it was child's play on the other 2 distros. PCLinuxOS has it's roots in Mandriva which I was using, so I have quite a bit of familiarity with it - it seems (so far) to have an absence of the major annoyances of Mandriva (such as my sound card not working sometimes and different drivers being loaded for it on every reboot).

I installed PCLinuxOS yesterday, writing over what had been my XP installation - that made me smile. Except for a VBox virtual XP, I am all Linux now. I was back up and working very quickly, thanks to FEBE and TEBE which got my Firefox and Thunderbird exactly as they had been. I'm now just adding the things I need and currently installing XP in Virtualbox. Next big job - multiple monitors which I failed at in Mandriva - fingers crossed!

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[otherego]

Thanks for the suggestion, g-c - I've not tried PCLinuxOS since I first started playing with computers. Seven desktops to choose from! I'd be interested to know which you went for.

I'm downloading the GNOME version, but can't help wondering whether one of the more lightweight desktops might not be better.

One of the things which prevents Linux establishing itself further seems, ironically, to be the sheer, overwhelming choice available - so many distros and so many variations of each. Part of the fun of it, of course.

writing over what had been my XP installation - that made me smile. - cruel - I'm sure Mr Ballmer would be deeply hurt.

Can XP be installed in VirtualBox without activation hassles? Or does that depend on the version? My blessed laptops have the Toshiba/Fujitsu version of the OEM installation discs - it'd be interesting to know whether these would work in a virtual machine. My understanding is that their pre-activation relies on their recognising the system/mother board - so it might just work.

I'm reluctant to actually bin poor old Windoze (it's been paid for, after all) - but so rarely boot into it that it's always weeks out of date and unusable until it and the antivirus etc have been laboriously updated. Using VBox would allow one to do this in the background while doing more useful/fun stuff on the main Linux installation - I assume. And it would save having to reboot the computer just because one wants to try something in Windows from time to time.

[grumpy-cook]

Your XP install should activate fine in VBox, even if they don't pre-activate. Actually with my previous Mandriva install which dual-booted with XP, I was able to activate my VBox XP with exactly the same key as my main XP install.

Re. your last paragraph, that's exactly what I've now moved to. It's important for me to be able to use Windows to try things out pertaining to my job, but I don't want to have to reboot to do so. I may even add Vista and W7 in due course.

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