Which distros should I consider ?

[Jerry Feldman]

On Wednesday 12 July 2006 11:37 pm, Laurence Guild wrote:
> I bought an HP laptop a couple of months ago.
> From "my computer" it shows:
>
> processor 1.60 GHz
> 590 Mhz, 504 MB of ram
>
> from Accesories -> system tools -> system information it shows
>
> total 512 MB, available 105.36 MB
> total virtual 2 gig
> avail virtual 1.96 gig
>
> I am familiar with unix in that I worked on an AIX for many years and SUN
> OS/solaris as well.
>
> I am a programmer, mainly interested in Perl, Ruby, Java, C++, etc. I
> might want to play with appache web server as well. I'm doing this for my
> resume, experience, and possible work. I want to be able to put linux on
> my resume and use my laptop with linux to do telecommuting type work if
> needed for various companies that require linux and I have a particular
> interest in web type work with Ruby, Perl/CGI, etc. I allready had an
> opportunity with a company that uses linux. After they contacted me via
> email, I told them I don't have it installed so I'd have to log onto
> their web server and I never heard back from them since. I felt this lack
> of linux on my laptop to be a distinct disadvantage and is something I
> have been meaning to address. I am interested in recommendations about
> which distros of linux I should consider and why. I've looked at the
> linux.org listing and the number of distros is endless and somewhat mind
> boggling. I will try to attend a linux meeting sometime, but may be up in
> maine on the 22nd. A guy I worked with says debian is the best and the
> mention of SUSE on the BLU site aroused my curiousity such that I browsed
> a book on this at the book store. I may be up in maine on the 19th as
> well however.
>
>  I would like to keep an Windows partition initially. Should I look for
> assistance on an install ? I don't want to mess up my machine or spend
> endless hours trying to figure this out.
I have 2 HP laptops:
1. Old presario PIII running SuSE 10.0 
2. HP NX6125 AMD Turion 64 ML-37 1GB memory running SuSE 10.1

In the office here, our systems run SuSE, Fedora, and Ubuntu with the 
majority running SuSE. 

There is NO "best distro". Each distro has its pros and cons. We have a 
number of different distros on http://www.testdrive.hp.com, but most of 
these are enterprise distros. You can go to that site, obtain a user id, 
and log into any of the systems.

Both SuSE and Fedora have graphical system admin tools that are relatively 
easy and straightforward. Ubuntu (and KUbuntu) is based on Debian and is 
possibly going to be one of the stronger distros in a few years. 
Note that SuSE has essentially a free distro as well as a retail. The retail 
contains some components that are not open source where OpenSuSE (and 
Debian and Fedora) are all fully open source. In most cases, your choice of 
distro is based on your personal preferences and some of the features. 
Debian is always 100% open source, and tends to lag a bit behind SuSE and 
Fedora. 

Additionally, SuSE and Red Hat have enterprise distros. Generally the 
enterprise distros have very stable release dates and the updates lag 
behind the consumer versions. As you have seen, Skip Paul from Novell will 
be presenting SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 next week. They release both 
an enterprise server (SLES) and desktop (SLED) simultaneously. Most of the 
bits are the same except that SLES generally does not include a lot of the 
stuff you don't really want in a server. 

The BLU is planning an installfest in August, but you should be able to 
install yourself. 2 things you should try to do first, make sure you have 
your Windows data backed up and make sure you have defragmented it. Linux 
is now capable resizing Windows HP, but in the past, I have used Knoppix 
with QTParted to resize XP. QTParted looks like Partition Magic. Using 
Knoppix, you can validate that Linux will run properly on your system. 
Then, when installing Linux, it will recognize the Windows partition, and 
set up GRUB or LILO so it can boot either Linux or Windows. 
-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9
PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9