There's nothing special about Ubuntu in this respect
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| tracyanne Oct 15, 2008 8:52 AM EDT |
nt |
| r_a_trip Oct 15, 2008 12:44 PM EDT |
True. Most of the work is done upstream. |
| jdixon Oct 15, 2008 1:06 PM EDT |
As one teenager said to another sometime in the 80's: Hey, did you know Paul McCartney was in a band before Wings. Yes, there were Linux distributions before Ubuntu. Some of them even worked halfway well. Some of them still do. |
| Steven_Rosenber Oct 15, 2008 2:11 PM EDT |
Even though I use Ubuntu (and it's far from all I use), it's pretty clear that while it is very good, there are no shortage of distributions that are just as good or better. It all depends on your hardware, your skills and your tasks. I just rolled out a new desktop (old hardware, new drive, new install), and I used Debian because this particular box responds very well to it, and on marginal hardware Debian and Slackware perform as well as or better than anything in their default configurations. I also chose Debian Etch (rather than Lenny) because I'm testing the use of a Compact Flash chip (8 GB Transcend Ultra Speed 133x) as the main IDE drive, and I wanted to minimize the number of updates. I've grown quite fond of running Etch and not having 100+ updates per week, which is what Lenny is getting these days. Ubuntu 8.04 isn't all that great on this 2001-era machine with 256 MB of RAM. It runs, but not as well as 6.06. I could've run Ubuntu 6.06 and had it work fine (it's still one of my favorite Ubuntu releases) but Debian Etch rolls out a desktop environment that works for me and does it quite easily. It did take the better part of the day for all the packages to download (networking in our new building is a bit spotty), but after that all of them were the up to date. Also, right now Etch will be supported longer than Ubuntu 6.06. I'd use OpenBSD, but performance on the desktop is nowhere near as good as most Linux distros, it takes more work to build out the desktop environment, and those every-six-month upgrades are fairly painful when compared to almost all Linux distros. I bet upgrading Slackware from 11 to 12 is almost as painful, but I've never done it. In this case, since the hardware is old, the CPU and graphics chip slow and the RAM limited, that heavily influences my choice of distro for it. |
| bigg Oct 15, 2008 2:26 PM EDT |
> It all depends on your hardware, your skills and your tasks. Absolutely. That's a point I've tried to make in the past with regard to a certain distribution. I understand that some distros are worthless, but I don't use those distros. It drives me crazy to hear the statement that "there are too many distros". Any given distro is not one too many if it makes your life easier. My current distro of choice makes my life easy. Just because others don't have my needs gives them no reason to criticize that distro. |
| Steven_Rosenber Oct 15, 2008 2:51 PM EDT |
While there are more than 300 "active" distributions tracked at http://distrowatch.com, with pretty much something for everybody, Once you get past the top 40 or 50, you're in pretty obscure territory. Some might say only the top 20, with a few that don't poll so well added, are relevant. |
| jdixon Oct 15, 2008 2:52 PM EDT |
> I bet upgrading Slackware from 11 to 12 is almost as painful, but I've never done it. Yes, Slackware 11 to 12 was difficult, as it involved a complete kernel and toolchain upgrade. In retrospect, it would probably have been easier to back up my data and perform a clean reinstall. |
| Steven_Rosenber Oct 15, 2008 2:55 PM EDT |
I'm doing all my installs now with /home on a separate partition. That way I can swap distros or do a reinstall and use the same /home partition (backed up before I do anything, of course). |
| tracyanne Oct 15, 2008 4:53 PM EDT |
Quoting:I'm doing all my installs now with /home on a separate partition. How were you doing it before? |
| Steven_Rosenber Oct 15, 2008 6:12 PM EDT |
Quoting:How were you doing it before? Before, since I was usually dual- or triple booting, I'd have one swap partition (hda1) for all the Linux distros, then put one entire distro on each partition, i.e. Debian on hda2, Ubuntu on hda3, etc. Now, for single-boot systems, I do swap on hda1, then everything but /home on hda2. After that, I create an extended partition and then a secondary partition for /home. That way I can shrink /home and make as many other secondary partitions as I like. And since I have swap at the beginning of the drive, I can shrink hda2 and make the extended partition bigger, or vice versa, if I need more space on one or another. When many Linux distros auto-partition a drive, they tend to put swap in the middle, and that makes it harder to adjust the sizes of the other partitions. That's why I put swap first. This may not be the best way to do it, but it's been working for me. I think the new version of OpenBSD (4.4) allows installation on a non-primary partition, in i386 anyway, and that offers a lot more flexibility. I haven't done a dual-boot with OpenBSD in quite awhile, though. The other thing: if I am dual- or triple-booting, I install GRUB on the Master Boot Record for the first Linux distro on the drive, and for all other Linuxes or BSDs, I install whatever bootloader is available/easiest on their respective root partitions. Then I chainload to them from the main GRUB on the MBR. That way the various bootloaders configuration files get updated by their respective distros, and I never have problems with the MBR GRUB's menu.lst NOT getting updated by one distro or another. That said, I'm trying to break the dual-booting habit. It only leads to heartache and woe. |
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