At least you have a choice. The luxury of linux! CHOICE. So its a matter of taste. I've been running SUSE 10 on my desktop (my first distro adventure) and decided to give it a blast on my little Toshiba Satellite 1800s. not the most up to date piece of hardware out there. Couple of other distro's fell over on install due to poor resources on the little fella. But to my surprise and elation, SUSE 10 breezed on in...full install, all services. Full GUI:KDE, still runs better than the other OS it shipped with.
I'm happy because its a platform I am familiar with. But the choice is ultimately yours. And it works great as a dual boot OS.

I'm using Ubuntu 6.10 on my Toshiba A100. The only drivers I had to install were the ATI ones. Everything else, from SMP to the Intel wireless chipset, were supported already. I guess you were just really unlucky But I have heard that more advanced users feel restricted in Ubuntu anyway. I'm just getting used to Linux, and it's great for me.

Have you tried EasyUbuntu? It installs lots of different codecs automatically.

But I have heard that more advanced users feel restricted in Ubuntu anyway. I'm just getting used to Linux, and it's great for me.


I' am just humble enough (barely!) to not really consider myself an "advanced" user. But my experience with ubuntu has been exactly as you said. Once you get used to "root", it's hard to go back! (sudo is just sudo. root is root!)

I have to agree with the mepis crowd. I have been looking for a distro for my laptop which is a generic model manufactured by Clevo. Mepis (Ubuntu)is the only one that has worked with every thing from the get-go. As a bonus, All of the GIS (Geographical Information System) related apps installed cleanly without a problem either. SO hopefully my quest is over and I can spend more time solving problems and less time fixing my tools.

This might be Off Topic but:

You can have root in Ubuntu

$sudo su

password ******

# passwd root

enter new passwd for root and repeat at the prompt

That's the first thing I always did when installing Ubuntu
or it's other variations - save a heap of trouble - particularly
when as sometimes happens the sudoers config file stuffs up.

My recommendation is to use PCLinuxOS because is easy to do maintenance work, has a very good performace with old hardware and all the hardware is detected in 99% cases. Uses the lovelly apt-get but the look and fell is mandriva-like. Comfortable and powerfull in my opinion.

I've done the distro-dance for a long time, before I settled on CentOS. Their current version (4.4) is supported for a looooooooooong time. And to the best of my knowledge, also uses free software only.

Yeah, I did that pretty early on. I found that I would occasionally get errors along the lines of "unable to open conversation with su." Just really didn't seem worth fooling with, when MEPIS just worked. I certainly wouldn't disagree with recommending Ubuntu (or Kubuntu) for a relative noob, but I found MEPIS to be an excellent blend of "just works, out of the box", and the ease of use of the Debian package management system.

First, let me make clear that for a wide variety of reasons, I prefer Debian-based to Ubuntu-based distributions. (Yes, Ubuntu is a twea
This has two major reasons that are relevant to the current discussion:
1. I have never had Ubuntu or derivatives b oot cleanly on the first try from CD/DVD on either my Acer or Toshiba laptops. Kanotix, Knoppix, Morphix, the Debian-based SimplyMepis - all just worked.
2. Ubuntu is hopelessly GNOME-based; you use <a href="http://www.kubuntu.org/">another derivative</a> if you want a proper KDE install. To my knowledge, all of the Ubuntu derivatives at least default to GNOME as well. For most Windows refugees, this is less than ideal.

I am personally philosophically wary of any "Debian-derived" distro which either is dependent upon a single commercial entity (e.g., Canonical) or which complicates the licensing/installation situation relative to Debian. For me, that is Strike 1.

Also, having run a business for several years migrating people from Windows to other systems, it has been my consistent experience that KDE is better in nearly all respects than GNOME for these users. Strike 2.

Finally, in my experience, GNOME suffers from the same usability flaw that Microsoft Windows does - an overarching smug certainty that the user needn't be bothered by rthe full capabilities of his syste, that the UI exists as much to protect the user from himself as for any other reason. (For one famous example, Google 'gnome printing linus torvalds'.) KDE, Fluxbox and the rest aren't perfect - but I'll take (and support) a discoverable, consistent interface over a closed, fragile, disjointed one any day. Strike 3.

So which distro do I recommend? Until about two months ago, it was <a href="http://debian.tu-bs.de/project/kanotix/preview/KANOTIX-2006-01-RC4.iso">Kanotix</a> all the way. Full KDE support, excellent hardware support (courtesy of Knoppix and Debian), distributed as a Live CD with a painless install-to-HD feature...but.

But...you'll notice that the link abo e is to the release "2006-01 RC4". That's because Kanotix has failed to ship an "official" release for over a year. One of the main supporting developers recently left the project (with the release schedule being one of the justifications) and there doesn't seem to be the burning urgency that there was two or three years ago.

<a href="http://www.knoppix.org/">Knoppix</a> is becoming my default recommendation. Debian based, Live CD/DVD media, it has most of the goodness that was Kanotix (though your laptop is more likely to need tweaks like 'noapic' and 'nolapic' on the boot command line than in Kanotix). Solid community support and so on. Give it a try.

I have ben battling with SuSE for the last six months on my Acer laptop and am coming to the conclusion that, while it may be a great server or desktop OS, it's simply too painful on a laptop. This was more-or-less an experiment anyway, as I haven't had much success/happiness with RPM-based systems for at least three years now - too fragile and much easier to bork up than a Debian or slapt-based installer.

To the original questioner,and anybody else reading this - good luck; I hope this helps. I have no commercial interest in any of the above, save as a user... just commenting based on my experiences.

Jeff Dickey

jdickey wrote:

"Ubuntu is hopelessly GNOME-based; you use <a href="http://www.kubuntu.org/">another derivative</a> if you want a proper KDE install. To my knowledge, all of the Ubuntu derivatives at least default to GNOME as well. For most Windows refugees, this is less than ideal."

I fully agree that the Gnome desktop is less than ideal for a Windows user to transition to. However, Mepis, while Ubuntu-based, does default to KDE, and I had no issues with instaling it on my laptop, (except for the #^$&* broadcom wireless card, which ndiswrapper handled nicely).

I repeat, "calling MEPIS 'Ubuntu based'" is really not fair. While MEPIS *does* currently use the Ubuntu repositories, it does *not* take Ubuntu or Kubuntu as its starting point -- it starts from Debian, same as Ubuntu. In fact it started about 2 years before Ubuntu, hard to base something on a thing that doesn't exist yet.

There has got to be a better way to accurately describe the relationship between MEPIS & Ubuntu w/o using the, IMO, misleading phrase "Ubuntu based".

http://www.mepis.org/taxonomy/term/157/9

"Morgantown, WV, September 9, 2006 -- MEPIS has announced the release of SimplyMEPIS 6.0-1 DVD Edition; an update of SimplyMEPIS 6.0, MEPIS' first Ubuntu based edition released earlier this summer. The SimplyMEPIS 6.0-1 bootable DVD not only includes hundreds of bug and security fixes, but the 1,900 packages of the three SimplyMEPIS Extras CDs, as well."

If you don't like calling it Ubuntu based, I guess you need to take it up with Warren...;-)