Saturday, November 12, 2005
A brief follow-up, and selecting a distribution
First, I want to post a follow up to my last post. Apparently, I'm not the only one thinking this. This article on ZDNet talks about whether or not open source is in the midst of a bubble, much like the .com bubble from a few years ago. It appears you really have two options: 1.) Form the community, and once formed, you have the chance to charge for support, enhancements, etc., or 2.) Create a closed source, proprietary system, providing the source to customers until a sufficient customer base has been established that it is essentially a community, and then convert to pure open source. As I said in my previous post, I'm quite keen to follow this, and see what happens over the next couple of years.
So, I've been trying to decide exactly what distribution to settle on. A product I use at work requires Redhat Enterprise Linux 3 (RHEL3), but that uses a 2.4 kernel, and outdated software. So, I was looking for something more modern. I thought about sticking with the Redhat family, and going with Fedora Core 4. However, I decided to branch out from the Redhat umbrella. I've tried installing several distributions, namely Suse 9.2, Mandrake Powerpack 2005.1, Gentoo, and Ubuntu.
Admittedly, Suse 9.2 is old, so I didn't go with it. I tried to install Gentoo onto an external USB drive, and needless to say, that doesn't work. Well, technically it worked, but not realistically. Running any OS off an external USB drive is too slow to be used, as I discovered when I thought I would be smart and install Windows onto that drive. It was ridicilous how slow it ran. As for Gentoo itself, Given enough time or experience with Linux, I can definately see how Gentoo is a great distribution for servers, as it does allow each application to be compiled in such a manner that they are all highly tuned for your machine and/or setup. However, for a notebook, it takes too damned long to install software, and is way too much work.
So, next, I loaded Ubuntu. I chose to go with Hoary Hedgehog, since it was the latest and greatest. Several people I work with have been raving about Ubuntu. I did find it extremely easy to install, and for an average user like my wife, I think it's a great distro. It, or Linspire, probably have the best chance of being a "desktop" distro. However, as a developer, I was quickly frustrated when I had to download and install a bunch of crap to a point where I could build some software. So, bye-bye Ubuntu.
That left Mandriva Powerpack 2005.1. I had installed Mandrake 10.1 a while back, and had really good luck with it. My experience with 2005.1 has been equally good. It comes with a lot of stuff right out of the box, including everything I need for development! It detected my hardware, and worked great, right out of the box. I have it setup where I can build software I need for work, plus it has Apache, MySql, and anything else I want.
While I agree choice is a good thing, I do think the pluthera of distro's out there make it very intimidating for anyone wanting to switch from Windows to Linux. I think Live CD's are a great idea, and an excellent way to become familiar with tools, etc. But until you install and use a distro, how can you ever know how well it will work? I also chose to stick with the mainline distro's. I thought about trying FreeBSD, but from what I read, that would be more trouble than it's worth for a laptop environment. I hope to get a desktop machine up and running soon so I can have a play with it and OpenSolaris.
Well, now that I have had all that fun installing various flavors of Linux, I think I'm ready to call it a night, sit back, drink some Egg Nog, and see if I can find a good football game to watch.
So, I've been trying to decide exactly what distribution to settle on. A product I use at work requires Redhat Enterprise Linux 3 (RHEL3), but that uses a 2.4 kernel, and outdated software. So, I was looking for something more modern. I thought about sticking with the Redhat family, and going with Fedora Core 4. However, I decided to branch out from the Redhat umbrella. I've tried installing several distributions, namely Suse 9.2, Mandrake Powerpack 2005.1, Gentoo, and Ubuntu.
Admittedly, Suse 9.2 is old, so I didn't go with it. I tried to install Gentoo onto an external USB drive, and needless to say, that doesn't work. Well, technically it worked, but not realistically. Running any OS off an external USB drive is too slow to be used, as I discovered when I thought I would be smart and install Windows onto that drive. It was ridicilous how slow it ran. As for Gentoo itself, Given enough time or experience with Linux, I can definately see how Gentoo is a great distribution for servers, as it does allow each application to be compiled in such a manner that they are all highly tuned for your machine and/or setup. However, for a notebook, it takes too damned long to install software, and is way too much work.
So, next, I loaded Ubuntu. I chose to go with Hoary Hedgehog, since it was the latest and greatest. Several people I work with have been raving about Ubuntu. I did find it extremely easy to install, and for an average user like my wife, I think it's a great distro. It, or Linspire, probably have the best chance of being a "desktop" distro. However, as a developer, I was quickly frustrated when I had to download and install a bunch of crap to a point where I could build some software. So, bye-bye Ubuntu.
That left Mandriva Powerpack 2005.1. I had installed Mandrake 10.1 a while back, and had really good luck with it. My experience with 2005.1 has been equally good. It comes with a lot of stuff right out of the box, including everything I need for development! It detected my hardware, and worked great, right out of the box. I have it setup where I can build software I need for work, plus it has Apache, MySql, and anything else I want.
While I agree choice is a good thing, I do think the pluthera of distro's out there make it very intimidating for anyone wanting to switch from Windows to Linux. I think Live CD's are a great idea, and an excellent way to become familiar with tools, etc. But until you install and use a distro, how can you ever know how well it will work? I also chose to stick with the mainline distro's. I thought about trying FreeBSD, but from what I read, that would be more trouble than it's worth for a laptop environment. I hope to get a desktop machine up and running soon so I can have a play with it and OpenSolaris.
Well, now that I have had all that fun installing various flavors of Linux, I think I'm ready to call it a night, sit back, drink some Egg Nog, and see if I can find a good football game to watch.
