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[Rainmaker]

hehe :D Ok, so my tongue's firmly in my cheek. But seriously, I am a happy Linux user (although I do dual boot with XP Pro). Who else here uses Linux, what are your favourite distros, and why?

[Paul_ADSL24]

openSuSE 10.2 because I'm a Novell FanBoy

[Rainmaker]

Eight linux users so far (though only one reply! :()... considering the relatively small membership of this forum (NO disrespect indended!) that's quite something really. Either linux is getting more popular, or people migrating to ADSL24/Enta are geeks to start with LOL :D

Come on people, let's have some proper linux discussion :) Paul, cheers for the reply mate, always nice to come across another linux fan.

[funky^munky]

I've just installed a dual boot ubuntu/XP home on my PC, Have to say I wasnt that impressed with ubuntu, install was simple fast and efficent however, (bearing in mind I am a linux newby) 1 week experience to be precise,
I have to say I wasnt that impressed with ubuntu at first I received many errors in setting things up the way I liked em. kinda reminding me of microsnots cracked windows in many ways, errors every step of the way in installing apps, crashes and screen freezes etc. especially when I totally screwed up the whole add remove apps/online updates with one simple line of text which took hours to find a solution to :(

Of course some of these problems were me being new and self inflicted however some simply down to the OS and apps. which leads me to a question: does anyone know of any resources helping with grub setup and changing order of default boot operating system?As I am not ready to use ubuntu as my default OS yet

Lastly I have to say with the way microsucks is going, I have no choice but learn a new operating system cos its getting to the point where I wonder who exactly owns my PC me or bill gates LOL. Oh btw OSX is out as an option cos i like to be able to upgrade and tinker with a computers hardware

[Paul_ADSL24]

If you search the builtin Ubuntu help for "grub" you should find what you're looking for but in brief this is what it says:-

To change which operating system starts by default when the computer starts up, edit the grub configuration file.

1. Make a backup of the configuration file, and open it in a text editor:
sudo cp /boot/grub/menu.lst /boot/grub/menu.lst_backup
sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst



2. Find this line:
...
default 0
...



3. Replace with the following line:
default X

You should replace X with a number, according to the order which your operating systems appear in the configuration file. You should start counting from 0. For example, if you wish the default operating system to be the first in the list, replace X with 0, if you wish the default operating system to be the second in the list, replace X with 1, and so on.

4. Save the edited file

[Rainmaker]

And also, if you'd prefer something that "just works" and is very Windows-like to get you started, consider Xandros, openSuse, or PCLinuxOS. All of these "just work" pretty much, and you won't get the crashes etc you seem to have experienced with Ubuntu.

Xandros especially is very Windows-like, and easy to configure. That said I prefer PCLOS as it's much more configurable (hardware, servers, windows networking a la Samba etc) and plays MP3, DVD, MPEG, Flash 9, Real etc "out of the box". You could always download the live cd from www.pclinuxos.com and see what you think.

Good luck either way, and welcome to linux - you'll like it :D

[AORman]

I can't get Ubuntu to install on my system. The CDR boots ok, but the so called installer keeps throwing up error messages about NULL handler??
So I guess I'll just stick with Mandrake for now

[Paul_ADSL24]

This is what I find funny about Linux. I tried to install Mandrake a while ago and while it seemed to install ok it wouldn't boot past my USB controllers. Admittedly I didn't spend any time trying to fix it. Everyones experience is so different even within distros that you have to be prepared to work at it.

Don't get me wrong. On the server side it's unbeatable but people just want to click go and it goes so until all the "main" distros can offer this I guess uncle Bill can sleep safe at night.

[Rainmaker]

Sorry to waken the thread, but I just had to share. I downloaded the brand new release of CentOS 5 the other night (which is a 100% copy of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, without the Red Hat proprietary artwork so as to maintain compliance with the GNU licence - and unlike RHEL is absolutely free!).

It installed flawlessly, I had mplayer streaming Real and Windows format videos in two minutes flat, it's ROCK SOLID compared to other distros (I TRIED to kill it and couldn't!), and frankly I wish I could change my vote above lol

Adding a web server was as easy as clicking "Start httpd" and copying index.html to my htdocs folder LOL This distro rocks, and I wholly recommend it. The Anaconda installer has superb hardware detection.

http://www.centos.org/

Also found Ubuntu Ultimate 1.3 live DVD today - which may be worth a try for you, AORman? It's basically a tweaked version of Ubuntu, with some custom code for stability, and all proprietary codecs installed out of the box (WMV, MPG, Real, MP3 etc).

http://ubuntusoftware.info/Ubuntu_Ultimate_1.3/

[AORman]

Thanks Rainmaker, I'll give that a try.
I am playing around with Mandriva just now, but not doing anything serious with it yet.

[Paul_ADSL24]

I tried one of the CentOS releases last year and it just didn't grab me. I can't remember why now but a few silly errors springs to mind. It may be worth another look now but there comes a point where you have to stop trying the different distros and just settle down and use one of them full time.

[Rainmaker]

I tried one of the CentOS releases last year and it just didn't grab me. I can't remember why now but a few silly errors springs to mind. It may be worth another look now but there comes a point where you have to stop trying the different distros and just settle down and use one of them full time.

Yep, fair play fella. As I said I'm really relatively new to *nix (<12 months) so I'm still experimenting :D I do agree that once you have a feel for what suits you, you should settle into a distro and learn it inside out, rather than messing in ten at once (jack of all trades, springs to mind).

Oh well :D

[AORman]

Rainmaker, whats this CentOS like compared to say Mandriva, if you can say?
If you thinks its better or easier??? I wouldn't mind trying it for myself. I have the 6 iso's ready to burn onto cd's. So whats' it like for burning dvd's etc and movie playing? Just interested.
Thanks

[Rainmaker]

I'm typing this now from Firefox in CentOS 5. It's a rock solid distro (as can be expected of a Red Hat Enterprise product), and makes setting up and running a server (mail, news, web, dns, ftp, you name it) but that said it is just that - enterprise. It's very heavily designed around business use, I'm only using it because of its reliability.

Movie support is almost non-existent. I had to add the repositories for dags myself, then download, configure and install mplayer, plugins, codecs, java, flash, etc. It's running perfectly now, but if you're a linux newbie I would say stick with something like Mandriva, PCLinuxOS, Ubuntu Ultimate (not "normal" Ubuntu), Linux Mint, Mepis etc. Those all come with plugins and media set up out of the box.

[AORman]

Ok thanks for the feedback. Yea I think I will stick with Mandriva. I say I am a newbie, but realistically I suppose I'm not because I have been dabbling with Mandrake since version 7, but not really got into it, although I am progressing slowly.

I appreciate what you say about reliability, thats why I am using XP pro, and have tried Windows server 2003 because it is a rock solid OS as well. I'm not making MS out to be something its not, its just my experience.

[Tibul]

I dual boot between vista and kubuntu, although i tend to find myself still using windows much more although i suppose my work requires it but i do like to dabble with nix every now and then, but in my opinion i like both windows OS's and linux OS's so i cant complain they both have there shortcomings and advantages.

[AORman]

I dual boot between XP and Mandriva at present, but have been doing similar between Mandrake and othe MS systems for a few years now.
Like you, Tibul, I find I use windows a lot more and play around in Mandriva.
Agreed, they both have advantages and disadvantages, but I suppose its what you are used to.

[Rainmaker]

Over 4.3% of members report using gnu/linux so far :D

[Dan]

Ive tried Ubuntu in a virtual pc enviroment before and it ok, I have recently tried Mandriva as a dual boot but I had problems with that not allowing me to install samba into it. So I then switched to openSuSe 10.2 which has samba built in and works.I am however now having problems with it not deleting files correctly it after you have emptied the trash can. Looking at the file system through windows using a 3rd party app shows the files to still be in the trash folder they are just not visible in linux.This has meant that is slowly consumed the disk space on its partition and become pretty useless :(

So any suggestions on which other free distros are out there that are good ?