[svlug] Suggestion for dist to use on dual-boot system

[Mark Weisler]

On Monday 21 July 2008 12:15:07 Tony Cappellini wrote:
> There seems to be a big following behind Ubuntu, I'm not sure why.
It's because the Ubuntu community has put together a distro that delivers 
excellent overall value. That includes ease of install but also maintenance 
and usefulness over a life of  (roughly) a year to several years for each 
install/distro. I'm not on a soap box here-happily there are a number of 
other excellent distros now. Ubuntu also benefits by having the Debian 
package management system which may be the most useful and coherent of the 
package management systems.

> I 
> particularly don't like the way the desktop looks ;-)
Then change it. You can use KDE, Gnome, XFCE, and have many other choices. The 
nice thing is you get the underlying stability and quality and the ability to 
put in or take out resources to suit your needs. And help from a big 
community.

> Ok, so it may be easy to install, I can't say installing Red Hat was hard
> for me, but maybe I've always had well-supported hardware.

>
> I had used Red Hat before Fedora, Mandrake (whatever happened to this?),
> and Suse (is this still popular?).
Mandrake+Conectiva ->Mandriva (the newish and current distro) ...very popular 
and useful. This is also used a good deal as a server platform.

Suse is a quality distro and doing well in Europe and business environments.

Centos is Red Hat released without the Red Hat support (email and phone 
mostly) and is cost-free. Since it _is_ Red Hat it is very reliable and 
suitable for production environments but is not as "interesting" as Fedora or 
other very current desktop distros.

> It's been many years since I've used Linux at work, and have recently been
> required to use it again in my current job.
You don't mention use of Linux away from work but the good news is that Linux 
in general has improved _tremendously_ in the last two or so years in terms 
of sanity of install as well as living with it after the install.
>
> I'd like to install it in a dual-boot setup with Windows XP on my laptop,
> and would like to get some ideas as to what is the most stable, popular
> dists these days.
>
> One option is to use it in a VM with Vmware, but I also would like to try
> setting up a dedicated partition, just for practice , if anything.

>
> thanks
Good luck. You have a number of fine candidates from which to choose-or try 
several through the magic of VM.
-- 
Mark Weisler  
PGP: 0x68E462B6  http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
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