Other Distro's you'd recommend?

[aged hippy]

Re: Other Distro's you'd recommend?

I've just installed Mepis 8.0, and i have no hesitation recommending it to anyone who likes the KDE 3.5 desktop.

This following shouldn't be seen as criticism.... but ....

Firefox is installed (by default) and Flash works.
Amarok plays mp3s without downloading extra codecs.
Kaffeine plays movies full-screen ditto.
ATI drivers are installed and enabled.
Synaptic shows 0 updates post-install. :P

One whinge is that not all partitions/drives are mounted at boot, but that's easily remedied.

I am highly impressed with it.

[Qqmike]

Re: Other Distro's you'd recommend?

Pretty cool, aged hippy. I had heard that 8.0 has been out. I recall trying, I think 6 or some-such a couple years ago (it had the 3-D cube etc--I had Super Grub Disk on one face and Beyonce on another ...), and IT was good, just like you are reporting here -- pretty much ready-to-go out of the CD drive. Thanks for your motivating review to try it sometime soon ('cept dibl has me into sidux at the moment).

[MoonRise]

Re: Other Distro's you'd recommend?

I've been playing around with Knopix. I've been pleased with it. No complaints. Live DVD is fully loaded.

[Snowhog]

Re: Other Distro's you'd recommend?

Thumbs up for sidux. It just rocks!

[divide0]

Re: Other Distro's you'd recommend?

I put Slax on a 2GB flash drive to be used in case of emergencies. It's really quick, too!

In fact, while it doesn't come with KDE 4.2, you can put it on there rather easily.

I would recommend Slax to anyone to uses a very old computer, or for a back-up OS.

[chadikins]

Re: Other Distro's you'd recommend?

I have been playing with Mepis AntiX. It is pretty solid, minimal and fast. Hope to install on a netbook soon.

[Qqmike]

Re: Other Distro's you'd recommend?

@M-R: What's up with Knoppix?

[MoonRise]

Re: Other Distro's you'd recommend?

@M-R: What's up with Knoppix?

Just been using the Live DVD but it has a lot of good pre-installed tools. Seems I read somewhere that they might start using KDE4.2, but not totally sure. Web-Site kind of hard to navigate, at least for me anyway. Loads easily and seems to detect everything on both of my systems. Interesting boot up sound when going into the KDE desktop. Seems very polished.

[Qqmike]

Re: Other Distro's you'd recommend?

I've only used it for rescue. It also has testdisk/photorec which I tested once. And, yes, it mounts all your devices nicely. I'm wondering, does it have browser, file manager, email, word processor, that stuff? I can't recall what's involved there, but it surely must. It has like 1600 packages. The other one is System RescueCD, but I found it kinda clumsy/unclear (that was a couple years ago, though).


I'm realizing with sidux there's dues to be paid. The learning is fun--their manual is one of the best Linux guides I've seen with a distro. I got it up and going easily, in just 10 minutes total time (to internal hard drive), and mostly configured. But being back here after two days in sidux, Kubuntu 8.04.2 sure feels good--smooth, polished, no glitches/crashing or choppy edges Of course, it's all relative in that respect.

[aged hippy]

Re: Other Distro's you'd recommend?

I have been playing with Mepis AntiX. It is pretty solid, minimal and fast. Hope to install on a netbook soon.

I'm wondering, does Antix use the KDE 3.5 desktop and is it also an LTS release the same as Mepis 8.0?

... as you can see - i'm not at all familiar with it

[toad]

Re: Other Distro's you'd recommend?

Nope, Antix is made by anticapitalista and is as lightweight as poss, i.e. fluxbox - but he's done it well, i.e. it is actually usable. Kind of like DSL (from which he may have nicked the conf file).

I've just installed lenny kde on virtualbox and must say that it is flying. It's been a long time coming, but worth the wait.

Also gave OpenSuse the time of day again after many a year and was struck by their user friendliness. Haven't installed anything yet but I've been told that they have sorted out their package management. If so, it is definitely the distro for click happy, sort of knowledgeable windows users.

[aged hippy]

Re: Other Distro's you'd recommend?

Thank You for that.

I must admit, i'm really, really impressed with Mepis, i've been using it constantly since i installed it -- and Firefox hasn't crashed once - even though i'm using all the add-ons i had to disble in Kubuntu 8)

... which makes me wonder if the frequent crashing was Firefox's fault .... or Kubuntu's.

[toad]

Re: Other Distro's you'd recommend?

Sorry for going off the rails Check on the mepis forum for toad and there is a bunch of stuff for minimizing the size of remastered isos...

Other than that I am glad that mepis is still going strong. BTW, I haven't had any firefox crashes on any distro (I'm relieved to say!). Could it have been a borked add on or some such?

[aged hippy]

Re: Other Distro's you'd recommend?

... suddenly finding myself three parishes away from the Topic...

I un-installed Ff thrice, re-installed via Adept once, via Ubuntuzilla twice, un-installed all addons, and still had frequent crashes.... maybe two, three, or even four a day.

It may have been a Flash issue.... but i never could work out precisely what it was.


Apologies to all for de-railing the Topic.

[MoonRise]

Re: Other Distro's you'd recommend?

@Q

The Live DVD has most of those. It's fairly complete and yes I've used it for rescue as well but due to it's completeness. I'd rather have that on a USB stick for rescue other than Puppy but DVD isn't bad. Yep, after being in Knoppix, Kubuntu does feel a lot better, especially after being so use to KDE4. I was surprised at how I don't miss KDE3.