[svlug] Fedora or Ubuntu for novis.

[Luke S Crawford]

Alan DuBoff <aland at softorchestra.com> writes:

... snipped some good suggestions ...

> > Out of box I
> > got a nice working laptop.  really all I had to change was the font size
> > in the terminal application.  Everything else, suspend to ram, wifi,
> > etc... "Just Worked"  I could even configure the wireless from the gui
> > with no extra effort.  In my world, GUIs that work reliably are pretty rare.
> 
> I don't find that to be the case these days. Xorg gets it right most
> of the time. Again, I don't know what Debian you were installing, but
> maybe unstable would have supported it better.

Oh, xorg usually works fine (once you get the modelines right)  I'm sure that
if I wanted to screw with it (X --configure didn't help, but I'm sure I could
have found the modlines somewhere)  I could have gotten debian X to use the
full 800x480.  By 'GUI that works reliably'  I meant a configuration gui.  
In this case, I was impressed by how the wifi configuration widget worked 
out of box, with zero tweaking on my part.   On my last laptop, I found 
it easier to just invoke wpa_supplicant on the command line than to screw
about with the control panel.  (that last laptop was an older version of
ubuntu, and it was installed by someone else, so it was possibly pre-broken)

I'm sure I could have made Debian 4 work... if I wanted to spend the time.
But it's nice when things 'just work'  (well, and I've been ridiculously
busy lately.)  

Speaking of other distros, has anyone messed with arch?  I need to start
running xensource-distributed Xen 3.3 (so I have to move away from my
current CentOS provided hypervisor and Dom0, and without the advantage of
the well-maintained xen packages, I see no reason to put up with the huge
irritation that is the easily corrupted RPM database)  and Arch has been
suggested as maybe a better alternative to slackware.  (I need x86_64, so we'd
be talking slamd64 or something else weird)  

but yeah.  I want a really basic userland (If I get the basic gcc toolset I 
can build all the fancy stuff I need)  over which I can overlay 
the xensource kernel and xen tools.  I want something that isn't going to 
refuse to allow me to install anything else if I interrupt the package update
process.    I was doing this with debian for a while, and it worked fine,
I suppose I could go back to debian, but in this case compiling
things like my sshd from scratch seems like it might be a good idea.   

I have also been thinking about gentoo.  I mean, I'm really a *BSD guy (or 
I was before I got so into the Xen stuff)  but the linux support for Xen
is so much better than anything else that you really want a Linux in the Dom0.
NetBSD tends to lag in terms of Xen features, and still lacks x86_64 Xen0 
support in anything but the unstable release (though it would likely make 
a better Dom0 OS due to it's smaller memory footprint and better handling
of low memory conditions.)  I could, I suppose, use gentoo for the base 
system and then compile for myself the things I want more control over.  
Gentoo, I understand, has a more *bsd kind of feel.