Some suggestions on distros, please.

hypno · 10-25-2003, 11:30 PM

I bought RedHat 9 a few weeks ago, and I really do like Linux, I can do alot things faster and better than I could on Win2k, though I don't get as much FPS in most games as I did in Win2k it's barely noticibe.

Though I like Linux, I don't really like RedHat that much, they added alot of crap I didn't really need or want and it seems rather...sluggish, even more so after I installed Gnome 2.4.1, now I don't have the best system in the world but I don't think it should be moving so slow at times.

So what i'm looking for is some recommendations for some other distros, i'm not exactly a pro at Linux yet, but i'd like to have a distro that runs a bit faster on my machine and gives me the ability to customize things.

My Specs:

ASUS A7S333 Mobo
AMD AthlonXP 1800+
Gefore 4 Ti4200 128 MB DDR RAM
Seagate 80GB HD
256MB 2100 DDR RAM

namespace · 10-26-2003, 12:24 AM

Hi. Why not creat your own distro? www.linuxfromscratch.org.
If you think it's too boring,maybe Debian is the most professional one.I don't think there is much difference among these distros.It's not hard to change one similiar to another.For example,Redhat can use apt and all of Debian's packages,also you could change the boot style to Debian-like,and sure Debian could uses rpms without problem.

So,if you have time,LFS could be a best for you.

slakmagik · 10-26-2003, 01:19 AM

Somewhat easier than that, Slack's fast and everyone who's tried it claims gentoo's the fastest. So those are some options. RH is almost universally held to be the slowest distro around.

All this is variable - you can optimize RH and gunk up gentoo - just talking ootb.

RickyJaff · 10-26-2003, 04:11 AM

If you think u have lots of crap then try..
www.elxlinux.com

Robert0380 · 10-26-2003, 05:33 AM

gentoo blow redhat away IMHO. i've used redhat on the machine i use as my desktop and now it has Gentoo on it. Needless to say Gentoo has it hands down. Gentoo is like LFS for dummies. Everything is compiled from source (if u start from stage 1 of the install process) which allows for better optimizations and what not ( you can set your own compiler flags and compile for you specific processor). In your case -march=athlon-xp.

Also, the package manager is way better than redhats rpm system. Gentoo downloads and installs the source code with your compiler flags that u set during the install process and of course u can change these if you want. Install Nvidia drivers is extremely easy too, 2 commands really:

emerge nvidia-kernel
emerge nvidia-glx

and u now have 3D support.

I could be exaggerating but it was that easy for me honestly. I also got kind of crazy with WIndow Managers because it's easy to install and use those as well. The only thing about installing Gentoo is that it takes a lot of time if you start from stage 1 and also installing packages takes time for big stuff like XFree, Gnome, KDE and other large apps. Just the 1st few stages of the install take about 4 - 6 hours for me (athlon-tbird 1.1GHz).

But there is my suggestion, Gentoo. Take a long time to install but seems easy to deal with and is by far faster than redhat (and probably most if not all binary distros).

an oh, you only get what you ask for. you have to install the packages you want via the emerge command. lastly, you dont have to worry about waiting on a new version of Gentoo to come out to get the lastest and greatest stuff.

emerge sync
emerge -u world

and you have the lastest version of gentoo and all apps you have previously installed.

dalek · 10-26-2003, 05:46 AM

I'm with Robert0380. If you want speed go with Gentoo. If you don't need it then you don't install it. NO bloat crap. The install, though time consuming, is not that bad. You just have to really read the how to. It took me three or four tries but it is really fast.

That emerge thing is nice to. No more dependancies to worry about. It takes care of that too.

My two cents worth.

Later

Usefull links for Gentoo

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-x86-install.xml
http://members.rogers.com/ctmlinux/gentooguide.html

trickykid · 10-26-2003, 07:37 AM

Moved: More suitable in the Distro forum where we have many many threads asking this same question. Regards.

hypno · 10-26-2003, 04:23 PM

Hm, thanks for the suggestions, I'd like to try LFS sometime, however I believe it is a bit too advanced for me right now. Gentoo sounds very good, i'll try that for sure.

Also, my apologies for posting in the wrong forum, figured that Linux-General was good enough for this topic.

Trinity22 · 10-27-2003, 12:03 PM

Jamd-Linux.com is optimized for i686 and is quite customizable. It's an offshoot of red hat 9 though.

trinity