tried the rest - sticking with the best :)

[knoppix33]

I like Slackware 9.1 and 10.0, but I love Knoppix (3.3 to 3.7). I like its simplicity, nothing to install after the OS.
Don't know Debian. Isn't this unstable? I know Knoppix is based on it, but hey, it's a great OS.

[gowator]

Debian. My particular flavor, Kanotix sid. Been on a little distro whoring spree and frankly nothing else can touch the apt package install system.

First tried SUSE. Yast, I am sorry is very overrated and like every other downloadable-version of a commercial distro is intent on installing pkgs from cd or forget it. Yes, I got it going but it is still clunky, clumsy, non-intuitive. Apt has it beat hands-down and kpackage leaves Yast in dust.

Now trying Mandrake. Nopers, same deal. First you have the elusive CD4 (which can be remedied) on the downloadable version. It is tied so heavily to CD apron strings for installing it's just annoying as hell. Even the things that come on CD, it felt like I was playing that sequel to Myst (name escapes me) where you are changing CDs every other click or so. And for whatever reason I was stuck in KDE 3.2 land - totally not me.

Haven't tried Fedora yet, have the iso's but if it is as disappointing as the other rpm package distros I don't think it is worth the time for the install. Only plus is that all the redhat experts at work may be able to provide some more help than on my debian based distros. But I manage.

much as I agree with the end result I find the reasons wrong...
mostly bad marketing by Mandrake but CD4 contains NOTHING you need. what it dioes have are a few commercial progs (mainly demo's) and pre-made RPMS for NVIDIA/ATI and winmodems... all of which can just be downloaded from a website...


Once it is installed then the first thing to do is delete the CD sources...
and install the urpmi web sources for main/contrib and plf. If you didnt do this then you didnt really try the distro ....

second you need to find www.mandrakeusers.org ... ignore the official mandrake supoprt and try this...
It is much faster to get replies than here and certainly faster than kano's forum if you dont speak German!

On Suse -

Apt has it beat hands-down and kpackage leaves Yast in dust.

In other words you didnt try apt4rpm so once again you missed out... but it is a lot harder to install stuff not on the Cd's and again the support forum is much faster than here tho less fun and a bit stuffy! http://forums.suselinuxsupport.de/


In the end I prefer my deb installs and kanotix as a quick installmethod but I love by Gentoo installs and Mandrake is OK if a bit too noobified for me...

[j.drake]

XP Pro (sorry). I do love Debian, though. It's getting there.

jd

[nishtya]

gowator, I did, indeed, go to easy urpmi and went through the whole shebang there. urpmi still looked for CDs. Finally had it that it would look on the net for a lousey package and then it griped about dependencies. Oh well.

To be fair, debian makes you jump through hoops to install pkgs from CD. When I was still on dialup I would try to download at work on broadband and bring home on CD (with dependencies) and though apt would get the primary pkg from the CD it didn't want to look there for dependencies... it was added in sources and I tried a tool as well Other than that, for me, debian and apt is best.

I still have mandrake on here and haven't given up on it. But it just pales in comparison to debian and I hope the devotees to this distro and its derivatives grow. It is great really is. Look at lindows/linspire. They have former windows-only people that can only handle windows merrily CNR-ing. Yes, it is costing them and plain old apt may be somewhat crippled but it is still the apt system that is running CNR for them. Not bad.

[jjmac]

It seems to me to boil down to how a person relates to
the distros maintenance facilits in the end. And package
management of course.

I like the way debconf dosen't try to take over from
me. If i want to utilise it as a service, i may, but
there is no insistence to do this.

I also like the flat nature of debs packaging system.
Rather than having everything in mysterious binary data
base files. A package is basically an "ar" archive anyway,
and so, it's not hard to access directly.

Back porting, also, is trivial. Otherwise there
all the same really. Perhaps, differeing in the
init technique, and the patch level of the kernel (RedHat).

Knoppix, like other debs, seem to go with this user
rules policy. Which is good.

Personally, i find the Magician logo used by
Mandrake a bit childish. And the "lets be a windows
clone" attemp, as made by the major distros, to be a
bit of a sell out. So, i just don't trust their
competence/integrity, just for those reasons.

jm

[gowator]

gowator, I did, indeed, go to easy urpmi and went through the whole shebang there. urpmi still looked for CDs. Finally had it that it would look on the net for a lousey package and then it griped about dependencies. Oh well.

To be fair, debian makes you jump through hoops to install pkgs from CD. When I was still on dialup I would try to download at work on broadband and bring home on CD (with dependencies) and though apt would get the primary pkg from the CD it didn't want to look there for dependencies... it was added in sources and I tried a tool as well Other than that, for me, debian and apt is best.

I still have mandrake on here and haven't given up on it. But it just pales in comparison to debian and I hope the devotees to this distro and its derivatives grow. It is great really is. Look at lindows/linspire. They have former windows-only people that can only handle windows merrily CNR-ing. Yes, it is costing them and plain old apt may be somewhat crippled but it is still the apt system that is running CNR for them. Not bad.

removig the sources for CD's
urpmi.remove media -a (or Cd1,CD2 etc.) but this is on the easy urpmi site, just not so obvious...

on the dependancies, i would guess you didnt have contribs?

but I prefer apt myself ...

portage is also pretty good if you feel ready for Gentoo... and I hear good things about arch for bleeding edge packages...

Personally, i find the Magician logo used by
Mandrake a bit childish. And the "lets be a windows
clone" attemp, as made by the major distros, to be a
bit of a sell out. So, i just don't trust their
competence/integrity, just for those reasons.

Can you believe they are fighting and being sue'd over using the magician ..LOL but I agree 100% about what sort of impression/trust does it give.

[A. Jorge Garcia]

How about:

http://kanotix.com/info/index.php
http://www.knoppix-std.org
http://www.phlak.org/modules/news
http://www.localareasecurity.com

Regards,
AJG

[jjmac]

----------------------------------
Can you believe they are fighting and being sue'd over
using the magician ..LOL but I agree 100% about what
sort of impression/trust does it give.
----------------------------------

Oh really, , not SCO by any chance, chuckle....


Just on the cdrom and dependency resolution thing
mentioned further up. I figure it's nothing that wouldn't
already be known,
but i'll mention it any way, just in case any one reading
this is wondering. If i'm not mistaken,
deb/dselect/apt will want to find some descripter info
on the cd, to verify it as an
official source
location. It's been a while since iv'e had much to do
with initialising a cd set. But,... if an official cd
set was handy, a person could use the files on one
of those to template that, Can't remember off hand
their names. I think one may be called ".dist".
It should be on the cd's root though. It will
basically just contain a descrition string that will
be added to a file in

"/var/lib/apt".

Probably "cdrom.list", then apt dselect will read
the cd, and place a file, something like...


"Debian%20GNU_Linux%203.0%20r0%20%5fWoody%5f%2 0-%
20Official%20i386%20Binary-1%20(20020718_dists
_unstable_contrib_binaryi386
_Packages"


in the "lists" subdirectory.

A bit of friggin around, true , but...
deb will be deb .

I generally just use "apt-get --dry-run install
<package>"

to get a depends list, then head for the "ftp" site
and then just back-port from src on a seperate partition.
All tree'd up to suite debs' helper scripts...

I know doing bulk upgrades/updates is basically what
"apt" is all about. And people haven't got a lot
of time to spend on stuff like this generally. But,
smaller, contained updating can be a lot of fun,
and informative.

Still, ... i wish apt-get, when pointed at a src
file would also reveal depends. But what the heck,
it's only a minor thing, and i get to learn so much
more, than i otherwise would

I was, very pleasently surprised too, with knoppix.
When i finally got "v3.3" to boot up,... to suite
my setup, (screen-resolution/vga, etc) and found

"sid" .

jm

[nishtya]

jj, I did install some tool or another that did what I believe you are talking about for to make a CD a genuine repository. Name escapes me. Was still a pita

as far as the mandrake and magician, I was thinking maybe it was the publishers of Mandrake the Magician comic. I have to go google

[CrashedAgain]

My fav: modified Knoppix. So far I've used 3.1,3.2,3.3 & 3.4.
Next best: modified Knoppix. So far I've tried....
I've best fiddling with Linux about a year and a half. Had quite a time getting started, first with Mandrake (got it to download, wouldn't load), then Debian (some problems trying to get it to install too. Then got a 'Freeduc' disk (a Knoppix derivative) from Linux Format magazine. Wow, it actually just installed & ran, big change from Debian, no tons of setup which I didn't know how to do, but it had 'only' XFCE for a desktop & I wanted KDE so I became a Knoppix fan. No slur on xfce intended, I just like KDE more, especially really impressed with konqueror. Also got used to apt-get, nothing else even comes close. The only negative was (and still is) that I customize quite a bit on initial setup so upgrading from version to version is quite a chore. Thus I'm reluctant to try 3.5,6 or 7 unless there appears to be some significant improvement not just minor changes.
From the same magazine I've also tried Yoper (wouldn't load), Slackware (needs lots of setup & no apt-get) , Fedora core, a SuSE live CD demo and Mandrake 9.2. Mandrake was impressive in that it just installed and EVERTHING worked, even my scanner but I didn't like the way it Mandraked everything (setupDrake this and menuDrake that etc). About a month later KDE 3.2 came out & it took another month to successfully accomplish the upgrade which I was only able to do after somebody more skilled than me posted the mdk-rpm's. Even then, it was necessary to install whole mega packages ie, to get kpat you had to take all of kgegames package. and, with MDK 10 out, nobody is making MDK 9 rpm's any more, this is not a problem with Debian, a .deb is a .deb is a .deb.
So Knoppix it is because it's the easiest way I know to get a Debian system complete with a backup run from CD. If I REALLY had to pick a second (non Debian) I would probably use Fedore just because it's generic redhat.