Topic: The Many Flavors of Linux

[D2Disciple]

Ah, good stuff, TechPro. You might be interested in WINE, which runs Windows programs natively on Linux. It's a cinch to install in Mint as well; in MintInstall you can easily search for WINE and click install. Once it's done, you can go into the configuration utility and tweak as you please. Install stuff to your virtual C drive, and you're off to the races.

Microsoft Office is supported, as well as many, many modern games. Yes, it's a little slower than in Windows, but for comparison's sake, I got Freespace to work mostly free of glitches or errors.  

It's even written for Mac OS X.  

http://www.winehq.org/

[TechPro]

NOTE: We were getting off topic in that other thread ... so I split the Linux conversation at D2Junkie's post.

Earlier conversation regarding the many flavors of Linux ...

Howdy Zantor! Good to see you dropped by! How'd you find us here?

INSERT: Some great desktops, TechPro. Good to see a fellow Linux Mint 7 user... It's one of the finest Linux distros I've seen (a free operating system that's almost as intuitive as Macintosh and three times as customizable). And that Scrat/Ubuntu wallpaper is classic! So an off-topic question: if you had to choose between Ubuntu "Jaunty" and Linux Mint 7, which would you pick?  

[begin off-topic reply]

Choose between Ubuntu 9.04 "Jaunty Jackalope" or Linux Mint 7 "Gloria"?  Tough choice actually.  I only just got Linux Mint 7 and have never had the Mint flavor before.  It's actually pretty yummy.  (yes, puns intended)

Over the past several days (over a week?) in my spare time at home I've been installing different flavors and styles of Linux on a low-end "test" system.  I've played around with Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Edubuntu, Arch, Debian, Mandriva, OpenSUSE, and Mint.  Usually trying both the Gnome and KDE variations of each when available.  I don't recall having heard of Linux Mint until someone mentioned in a thread I was browsing.  Most of the things I require in a Linux box to do at the least ... Mint setup to do easily.  As for Ubuntu, there's no denying the huge communities for the different flavors which means you can usually find good answers easily.  Also, Ubuntu seems to work really well and is very stable for me.  I've had Ubuntu alongside XP on my laptop for quite a while and I can do nearly everything I need except for some Microsoft Office 2007 specific document file types ... and a number of Windows specific games (as if games were important, pffft!) because I haven't played with that area in Linux yet (if I wanna play a game, I just reboot to Windows).   Both Linux styles work well.

Alex, I'll take both OS versions for Free.

[/end off-topic reply]

Today I installed Xubuntu (Ubuntu with the Xfce desktop)  ... and if I can get VNC going on it with SSL ... then it might be a keeper.  Pretty impressed.  Going to have to put it side by side with Mint to see which one wins.

I went through a made a list of all the systems I've tested over that last several months  with most of them in the last couple weeks ...

• Arch
• Ark
• Debian
• Fedora - Gnome
• Fedora - KDE
• Gentoo
• Mint
• Mandriva - Gnome
• Mandriva - KDE
• OpenSUSE - Gnome
• OpenSUSE - KDE
• Ubuntu - Gnome
• Ubuntu - (server)
• Edubuntu - Gnome
• Kubuntu - (Ubuntu with KDE instead of Gnome)
• Xubuntu - (Ubuntu with Xfce instead of Gnome)

I was going to check out Mint with the KDE desktop, but it's only in a DVD ISO ... and my test system doesn't have a DVD drive.  Heh, it's only an 866mhz Intel Pentium II with 512mb RAM. ... and the video card cannot do any of the 3D visual effects.   Makes it perfect for a "occasional desktop but usually simple file server" kind of system.

I haven't played around with Wine much yet.  Need to do that soon. I'm a bit sleep deprived at the moment.  (good grief! It's 3:00am!!!)

[D2Disciple]

Pardon my off-topic-ness. That tends to happen a lot around these areas. 

I used to have Xubuntu installed on an 8GB flash drive... It worked great for a portable OS. For a Pentium II, I would think Xubuntu would be the best choice, since it's so very lightweight.

I too have tried:

• Ubuntu (Hardy Heron)
• Ubuntu (Jaunty Jackalop)
• Xubuntu (Built from Hardy)
• Kubuntu (Built from Hardy - was not impressed at all)
• OpenSuSE 11.1
• PCLinuxOS (can't remember which version)
• Mandriva ONE (again, can't remember version number, never got it to work)
• Linux Mint 7: Gloria (GNOME)
• #! CrunchBang Linux (Built from Hardy)
• #! CrunchBang Linux (Built from Jaunty)

In fact, as I mention those, you may really like #! CrunchBang Linux. It's a build of Ubuntu on top of the super-lightweight, minimalistic OpenBox desktop environment. The customizable "Conky" system monitor means you can quickly glance at the desktop to get as much (or as little) information as you want to. There are no desktop icons, which means that desktop is almost absurdly minimalistic, but it's still very easy to use and extremely fast. It's not supported by Canonical, but it's got a pretty dedicated group of users on the forums (and the programmer who created it is good about implementing fixes within the week).  You should check it out.

Those are just my suggestions. Since I'm not much of a do-everything-with-command-lines person and I really just want an OS that's free and "just works," CrunchBang and Linux Mint 7 have been my two first choices for OSes.  To me, Mint just kinda edges #! out by a hair due to it's out-of-the-box support for almost everything you can throw at it. That said, I can't get it to work on my new laptop, so I'm about to give #! another shot.

[TechPro]

Hmmm.  I just might check that out.

Do you happen to know how easy it is to setup #! with Samba server, openSSH, NFS, and VNC server (with SSL)?  Having these work (and work well) is critical to my current end goal with this project.

Setting those up I would suspect to be very similar to the other distros.  When I tried to setup Fedora for file sharing accessible by Windows clients ... it clearly seemed to have been intentionally coded to either prevent that or seriously restrict it from letting you make it a file share server. Not surprised on that with Fedora tho, their site seemed to really push for users to do that sort of thing through the purchasable/enterprise distro (Red Hat Enterprise) ... since Fedora is kind of like Red Hat's "free consumer grade" distro.

Yeah, most of the KDE distros did not impress me.  Years ago (way back when Red Hat still did a free distro called "Red Hat" ... 5, 6 or more years ago?) I had played around with Mandrake (now Mandriva) and a free Red Hat for a specialized server I was experimenting with at work ... don't remember what distro versions they were ... and KDE seemed good then with lots of tools while Gnome was simpler for new users to just start using but with fewer tools than KDE.  These days it seems like Gnome is almost "king" among the Linux desktop gui styles.  Most (not quite all) of the KDE desktop distros I've tried this time around either just flat out didn't work because of problems, or were too resource heavy and hard to find anything.  Didn't like them.

My Gentoo attempt was laughable.  I had tried out Gentoo a few years back on a system that just barely (and I mean barely) was able to run it and it seemed OK, with an easy install including gui.  This time I'm using a much stronger system (866mhz pII FTW!  ) and Gentoo recently stopped doing the LiveCD distro, and is now only doing the minimal distro.  That means as soon as the CD booted, I had to manually perform at the command line, each of the setup steps one by one.  Thankfully I was able to find a good online step by step walkthrough.  Failed though when it came to installing a gui.  It crapped out every single way I tried to do it.  It would download the requested pack just fine, but then the builds would crash.  It was sooo close to being ready to "drive".

There are just sooo many flavors of Linux.  On the DBB.net, "Isaac" posted a graphic showing a Linux distro timeline... but he didn't post the most current version.  Here is a link to the page that has the distro time line.
http://futurist.se/gldt/

I recently came across this little tidbit:  http://distrowatch.com/stats.php?section=popularity
At least 299 different "brands" of Linux distros.   







Wow.... where did all that speechifying come from? 

[D2Disciple]

I've never tried to set up Samba with any distro of Linux before, so I really can't make a judgment. However, it would be identical to Ubuntu; #! is built off of a minimal installation of Crunchbang using the OpenBox GUI (and a few other modifications) to make it a fully featured OS with a footprint of, IIRC, little more than 1GB of hard drive space. Other than the obviously different desktop and lack of overkill visual effects, it looks a lot like Ubuntu. Just preposterously gray instead of preposterously.... well, brown.  

Never tried Fedora; never really desired to, either. I understand that, according to an article I read, it's Linus's favorite distro... But #! and Linux Mint seem to fit me best.

KDE 4 is just so cluttered. There are so many little graphical effects that I know would look really nice if just a few extras were removed (as if it's really necessary to have shut down buttons on the taskbar and in the main menu). I understand I can mess with a bit and make it look a little prettier (OpenSuSE KDE looked really nice, I must admit). GNOME looks really nice these days; it even has some transparency effects and such but doesn't suck from the resources so much. XFCE is really pretty clean, and now there is LXDE, which is optimized for netbooks if I'm correct, but it's looking quite nice from what I've seen.

But you're right. There are so many different flavors to choose from... And a lot of them look so similar as well (especially Ubuntu and it's many many spin-offs). But I'm glad to have finally limited my selection down to around three (Ubuntu Jaunty, Linux Mint 7 Gloria, and CrunchBang - all, of course, Ubuntu derivatives).

My ultimate desire is to find a fully-featured Windows replacement. With the advancements made between Hardy Heron and Jaunty Jackalope, I just think Linux Mint might do that within just a couple of years.  




.... And I should really get back to studying and stop surfing the danged 'net for the week.  

[TechPro]

Just tried out #! CrunchBang, and then Zenwalk.  Neither one liked the hardware of my "test" unit.  Didn't manage to work around it.  CrunchBang acted like it almost got there ... but left me with only a black screen in graphic mode with a mouse pointer in the middle.  Zenwalk had a nice gui installer that seemed to take forever, and got hung up when trying to setup the X Server.  Outright fatally failed even though it was going a nice graphic mode at the time.

So I tried out Puppy.  Super small OS, loads entirely into a 64mb RAMDISK, super fast (because it's loaded into RAM).  Pretty cool.  Designed to be most often ran just from CD, or flash drive, or in a virtual session.  I took the time to install on HD. A bit of a trick since it's LiveCD is more designed to be usually ran from the CD instead of installed on an HD.  The maker is kind of like ... Install on an HD?  Sure, if you want to, but why?.  You boot or run the CD ... Use Puppy, make changes/files/whatever and when you exit/shutdown it then saves what changed and the documents in a special file saved on your hard disk (whatever OS or file format it happens to be except NTFS) so that when you boot/run the CD again it will remember what you did and come up with those changes active. 

After I installed it on HD, it runs real fast.  My test unit is an 866mhz PII with 512mb RAM and it takes only 32 seconds from the moment it starts to read the HD to the moment it shows the Puppy desktop (and is ready to use).  Takes only 13 seconds to shutdown and power off.  (Dang!)

Did just about everything I needed.  Didn't manage to get it share files with Windows computers, and I didn't manage to get it to setup OpenSSH or any SSL services ... but it came with the ability to open Windows shares, along with Abiword and Gnumeric (Gnome Office) ... which is the nearest Linux solution for docx and xlsx MS Office 2007 files I've seen so far (nearest, but not quite there yet).

This one I think I'll install on my wimpy 533mhz that's currently a slo mo file server in Win2k.  Breath some life back into that ol' baby.  Maybe I'll drag out my old 400mhz from retirement/parts and see how it does on it.

Next ... I re-look and Ubuntu and Mint, see who I like best for an in home file server with occasional desktop.

[D2Disciple]

Ah yes, Puppy Linux. I actually installed that on my brother's machine - a 2.4GHz Celeron machine with only 256MB of RAM (I'm guessing a stick went bad or something). Anyway, the computer was so slow it wouldn't run XP, and Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS, and Linux Mint 7 wouldn't start (or else be so slow it was completely useless). Although managing to get Puppy up and running on his machine was somewhat of a nightmare, everything worked out in the end, and now he's happy to have a computer that actually runs at a decent speed. I'd like to get his printer working, but at any rate, Linux saves the day! 

I'm actually posting this from Fedora KDE right now on my new Pentium 4HT 3.4GHz machine. So far Linux Mint 7 KDE Community Edition and Fedora KDE have been the only KDE distros I've liked. Fedora is really clean-looking and does everything that I want it to - but I'll keep the whole sharing thing in mind if I decide to do any server work with it. I tried Mandriva 2009 KDE, and while it was nice, I kept having this feeling that I was using Windows 2000.  Linux Mint 7 KDE CE just refused to work on this machine, so Fedora was second best. But so far everything has been flawless, from installation to set up to tweaking to installing software... I've been very pleased. I'm curious to see how it will hold up once I get my nVidia GeForce 8600GT card in - but I'm sure at worst there won't be much of a hiccup, as nVidia drivers are pretty readily available to most Linux users.

Overall I really like the look and feel of Linux Mint 7 KDE better than the GNOME interface but still suffers from the cluttered-ness of the KDE desktop. Fedora does a pretty good job of cleaning that up. Since this is a fairly high-horsepower computer (P4HT 3.4GHz, 3GB 880MHz DDR SDRAM, EVGA 8600GT 256Mb DDR2 VRAM), I wanted something that really just looks great and has the potential to be used as an all-inclusive media center (I'll eventually dual-boot Fedora and Vista Ultimate whenever possible) and casual-to-moderate gaming machine. I'm about to try out wine though and see what happens... 

[Zantor]

I recently rediscovered Knoppix. Knoppix is a live CD like UBCD4Win, BART PE, RedHat SuperRescue, and PHLAK that can be used for various purposes. The latest version is 5.1.1.