Favorite Flavor of Linux

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Linux has been growing strong for the past few years and with it comes many different variations. Out of this motley array of distributions, which is your favorite?

Perhaps I should share

Mandrake Linux is the best distribution for sure. Easy for beginners and robust for even the most experienced Linux users. Check out their website at http://www.mandrakelinux.com/.

I've tried Mandrake and Yellow Dog, both of which seemed pretty good.

Source based distro with bsd-styles ports system. Once i found this distro, i couldn't believe that I had actually used others.

What's Linux? I was just wondering.

see http://linux.org

Hey Everybody,

I've been running MEPIS Linux (based off Debian unstable) for about 3-4 months now, and I totally love it. It's one of the growing number of 'LiveCD' distros - you can run it in RAM off your CD-ROM before installing it.

By the way, have you had much experience shrinking NTFS (a.k.a. Windows 2000/XP) partitions? I had to do that in order to split my hard-drive in half - Windows 2000 Pro was using the whole hard drive - and then install a new Linux partition.

Well, nice to find a fellow Linux geek.

Sincerely yours,

mentalman

Mentalman,
I know exactly what you mean about the partitions, Windows will not install to a Linux made partition (even when the partition is made specifically to be a Windows NTFS partition! Hopefully with Longhorn (haha) Microsoft will iron out a few of these bugs as they make some installation methods of Linux impossible. Flexibility is always nice.

As for the LiveCD distro you use, I wouldn't imagine that starting that flavor of Linux would be neccesarily quick (to load into memory). And since I always have so many problems with my CD ROM (just had Dell send me a new one tonight!) I probably would end up in a perdicament. However, if you could install this Linux onto the HD that would work well too.

I love Gentoo Linux, performance and customisability wise, though it's the actual installing it that's the problem.

I've grown up on initially DOS, then Windows from 3 years old.

When I start doing a stage 2 install for Gentoo 2004.1 amd64, I find it fine for the first 10 minutes or so, then I become anxious to get back to a familiar desktop environment

Argh, it pains me to no end, my continual message to every online community I know that closed source is evil and open source is the future, full of innovation and without limit ...

Hey Thomaszak,

One thing you might for making a Windows partition from Linux, is to grab the GUI tool QTParted - it comes on MEPIS Linux as the Partion Manager - it's a free, Linux-only version of Partition Magic. Just create a FAT partition, and when you install Windows 2000/XP you can have Windows just auto-convert it to NTFS.



It can be installed via CD-Rom to the hard drive. It's got a GUI installation for those who want/need one (me! <grin>)

To find out more about it go to http://www.mepis.org/

Enjoy,

mentalman

I recently got my hands on a free copy of Linspire and have been meaning to try it out. It might be the distribution that brings Linux to the masses!

http://www.linspire.com

My preferred distro is Debian. Some people get scared off by the installer's curses interface, but its documentation is useful. I wouldn't recommend stable for a desktop, but unstable is pretty good. My system is unstable/experimental with a custom kernel (2.6.7-ck5), the fd.o xserver, and some other stuff from outside sources.

http://www.linux.org

The link you posted didn't work. (No offense.)

Mich

Debian all the way

can't get much easier than apt-get

If I want to upgrade my whole system... apt-get dist-upgrade

if I want to install a package... apt-get install PACKAGE

OK, it's not Linux but I like FreeBSD, another open-source Unix-like operating system.

Its documentation is excellent, in the form of a handbook, man pages and other docs.

There is a "ports tree" to install additional applications easily, which is very large. Gentoo took this idea from FreeBSD.

For more information see, for example, http://www.freebsd.org/ and
http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/ra ... linux1.php

My favorite Linux is Red Hat. I use their Enterprise Linux and Fedora Core.