Distro-hoppers Anonymous

VastOne · 2013-02-23 15:44:30

^ Thanks hinto!

BTW....

I am Connor MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod. I was born in 1518 in the village of Glenfinnan on the shores of Loch Shiel and spun from the depths of debians hell known as SID .... And I am immortal

hinto · 2013-02-23 16:14:47

^ Just be sure to bypass Highlander 2
-H

VastOne · 2013-02-23 17:09:07

^

chameleon · 2013-02-23 17:33:47

^Cool wall!

Agnus · 2013-02-23 22:20:50

If I were a sailor, I'd probably shout out "I've had them all!" ... hehe. Well, not true anyway but I did do a lot of distro hopping in the late 1990s early 2000s. I eventually stuck with anything debain based around 2005 and am happy with it.

As Linux is also my day job, my boss wanted me to evaluate another enterprise-ready (read: pay-for-support-and-make-sure-it's-Oracle-certified) distro. Right now we're running RedHat but recently SuSE may become an option when SAP is involved. The problem is: I really ... ah ... dislike SuSE Linux. They had a great printed manual back when they were all the rage here in germany. But this is long gone history. And the one thing I always hated about SuSE was YaST - boy, what a sick tool that used to be.

Now, since duty requires me to have a look at it I installed openSuSE 12.2 in a virtual machine today. It still uses YaST, I still hate YaST - but: installing restricted codecs and my company's proprietary VPN stuff on that system worked quite well. I will not use this distro personally as I like #! way too much. But I found openSuSE to be less a pain in the bum than, say, Fedora when it comes to "that dekstop stuff" you do.

So, after 14 years I've really done a SuSE install today. Weird. But I think that sort of experience doesn't quite count as "hopping", right?

P.S.: happy to share my pain!

Last edited by Agnus (2013-02-23 22:21:21)

el_koraco · 2013-02-24 02:40:04

Agnus wrote:

It still uses YaST, I still hate YaST - but: installing restricted codecs and my company's proprietary VPN stuff on that system worked quite well.

Forget yast, use zypper directly. It's the smoothest package manager, be it a little slow.

ivanovnegro · 2013-02-24 18:48:32

ew wrote:

Like it or not, debian is nice, but not userfriendly, and will never be an alternative to MS, Mac or Ubuntu.

Now I am your biggest fan! Now let us go together for a glass of milk on the Ubuntu Forums.

chameleon · 2013-02-24 19:13:47

I really like this work;

Tux Hat Linux v1.5 i386 F4LL0UT Edition

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zh5TEuPmu6I

http://fav.me/d5w2un0

No website yet but the guy is doing great work...

In various theme flavours;
F4LL0UT, ToXiC, and FreeZy

Check it out

ew · 2013-02-24 20:29:42

ivanovnegro wrote:

ew wrote:
Like it or not, debian is nice, but not userfriendly, and will never be an alternative to MS, Mac or Ubuntu.
Now I am your biggest fan! Now let us go together for a glass of milk on the Ubuntu Forums.

LOL. But I`m not sure they will take it as a compliment:)

Resident Bot · 2013-02-25 14:50:36

What is a good distro if you take software into account? so far all the talk seems to be about this distro is more bloated or this one is quicker etc. but what about the software.
to me you want to be using something with a wide choice of software in the repos and not ancient stuff.

Agnus · 2013-02-25 16:52:52

el_koraco wrote:

Agnus wrote:
It still uses YaST, I still hate YaST - but: installing restricted codecs and my company's proprietary VPN stuff on that system worked quite well.
Forget yast, use zypper directly. It's the smoothest package manager, be it a little slow.

It's not the package management that annoys me. I already use zypper for installing stuff and found it quite similar to RedHat's yum. No, it's the configuration of anything else in the system that YaST takes care of and which still annoys me. I mean sure: when I was a young noob back in 1994 YaST was quite helpful in the beginning, getting the first ever installs to run. On the other hand, YaST may tempt you to not get a further understanding of the basics of Linux service and system configuration. Plus: the YaST license sucked for quite some time, but to be fair: this has already been changed years ago and I'm probably too biased towards other distros to acknowledge the efforts SuSE made in the past ten years.

pvsage · 2013-02-25 19:42:38

ChickenPie4Tea wrote:

What is a good distro if you take software into account? so far all the talk seems to be about this distro is more bloated or this one is quicker etc. but what about the software.
to me you want to be using something with a wide choice of software in the repos and not ancient stuff.

I'd say any distro based on Debian Testing or Unstable (and yes, for some users, this includes Ubuntu) is going to be good; most of the worst bugs get fixed in Experimental, just about everything you could want is in the repos, most everything that isn't in the repos is already as a Debian binary, and practically everything else is just a quick compile away. (OK, that last one applies to most distros...)

[soapbox]
There are a few packages - the Silverlight-enabled version of Wine necessary for Netflix, for example - that are developed specifically for Ubuntu. I feel Debian users should pester encourage the developers of those packages to swim upstream and find either the Debian non-free headwaters or a tributary like deb-multimedia. I also believe services like Netflix should be shown that their stubborn refusal to develop a client that will work natively on Linux is costing them subscribers.
[/soapbox]

Last edited by pvsage (2013-02-25 19:44:10)

Iranon · 2013-02-25 20:22:53

Debian already has very deep repositories, Ubuntu has probably the largest selection of official software - agree with CP4T that it'd be nice if developers of Ubuntu-specific stuff woul develop for Debian whenever practical.

Arch is worth mentioning because they fairly up-to-date packages and easy access to lots of stuff from a centralised unofficial repository. Its quality definitely isn't up to Debian's standards, but there's a lot available including some interesting tweaks of official packages (Arch keeps things pretty vanilla in its official repositories).

Both Debian and Arch are a little dogmatic about their infrastructure and better for it, just with a different focus (coherence vs. simplicity)

crash_harddrive · 2013-02-26 01:36:16

I set up my first Linux server with Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) because it was the first to support my RAID card out of the box - RocketRAID 2340 (although I had to set up the drivers manually). Haven't looked back. I've run Ubuntu, Arch, and then Ubuntu again (xubuntu) and so far I don't see moving on until I have a better alternative. I hope that CrunchBang will do what I need, but I have to have a full-featured MythTV server in order to have a media server for my network, and Debian doesn't do that yet. The firmware files for a TV card are a pain, and I don't want to have to copy them from my Ubuntu install. Maybe deb-multimedia.org can do this? Also, setting up lirc is a real pain if you don't have mythbuntu-control-center, it seems that setting up a remote is still a CLI hacker thing. I did this under Arch, but I'm just tired of hacking config files to get things set up. Any ideas?

ew · 2013-02-26 02:16:24

Wow, finally able to post from Archbang. This was a very steap hill to climb,
and I`m probably going to fall down very soon. But so far so good...

Archbang totally surprised me. Wifi worked out of the box, which it
doesn`t with any other distro. But grub couldn`t be installed to partition,
and all those mirrors was a pain to sort out and get it to work. Pacman was
also something new for me, so it required some googling...

But now everything is updated without breakage, and now I`m installing Chromium,
if that also work, then I guess I`m ready to start customizing Archbang. Only problem
is that it looks quite nice by default....

Well, anyway, I thought it should be more difficult and that I was nowhere ready to handle it,
but I found my way trough, and everything works. This was a pleasant surprise. People shouldn`t
feel intimidated by this. If I can do it, then everyone can:)

merelyjim · 2013-02-26 02:31:03

^
I've used ArchBang in the past and found it fast, stable; excellent. Very worth looking into!
The only drawback I found was that the more obscure Debian command-line tricks didn't work.

ew · 2013-02-26 02:39:04

merelyjim wrote:

^
I've used ArchBang in the past and found it fast, stable; excellent. Very worth looking into!
The only drawback I found was that the more obscure Debian command-line tricks didn't work.

I know. But there are probably lots of Arch-tricks to learn:)

Anyway, my first issue is to figuer out these error-messages which I get when launching chromium from terminal:

[ew@ew-arch ~]$ chromium
[1467:1489:0226/033428:ERROR:object_proxy.cc(624)] Failed to get name owner. Got org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NameHasNoOwner: Could not get owner of name 'org.chromium.Mtpd': no such name
[1467:1489:0226/033428:ERROR:object_proxy.cc(624)] Failed to get name owner. Got org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NameHasNoOwner: Could not get owner of name 'org.chromium.Mtpd': no such name
[1467:1467:0226/033428:ERROR:object_proxy.cc(529)] Failed to call method: org.chromium.Mtpd.EnumerateStorages: object_path= /org/chromium/Mtpd: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name org.chromium.Mtpd was not provided by any .service files

Chromium works just fine, but I hate error-messages:)

merelyjim · 2013-02-26 02:43:25

^
I have no idea either!
Love the fact there's always more to learn.

ew · 2013-02-26 12:31:25

merelyjim wrote:

^
I have no idea either!
Love the fact there's always more to learn.

Yes. That`s what makes it fun. Even though it can be frustrating at times.

james0610 · 2013-02-26 14:19:47

The problem i had with archbang was choppy video 720p and higher. Dont know why tried a lot of things, didnt work......came back to #! and all is well once more

chameleon · 2013-02-26 16:15:42

Tuxhat Linux now with website!

http://tuxhatlinux.webs.com/

hinto · 2013-02-26 16:17:24

^Darn... just when I hopped
-H

ew · 2013-02-26 17:44:16

james0610 wrote:

The problem i had with archbang was choppy video 720p and higher. Dont know why tried a lot of things, didnt work......came back to #! and all is well once more

Well. It was working fine for me, until I updated it, and thereby got the 3.7.9 kernel instead of the 3.6.8 kernel it came with. For some reason my pc is unbootable with 3.7 kernels... So I booted up Ubuntu, and used gparted to remove the arch-partitions, and then I reinstalled grub. So now I`m back to where I was. Multibooting Ubuntu, Crunchbang, Peppermint and WattOS. Well, what should I try next? Lol;)

james0610 · 2013-02-26 19:00:15

ew wrote:

james0610 wrote:
The problem i had with archbang was choppy video 720p and higher. Dont know why tried a lot of things, didnt work......came back to #! and all is well once more
Well. It was working fine for me, until I updated it, and thereby got the 3.7.9 kernel instead of the 3.6.8 kernel it came with. For some reason my pc is unbootable with 3.7 kernels... So I booted up Ubuntu, and used gparted to remove the arch-partitions, and then I reinstalled grub. So now I`m back to where I was. Multibooting Ubuntu, Crunchbang, Peppermint and WattOS. Well, what should I try next? Lol;)

Heard lots about people with problems on new kernel. I dont think mine was kernel related. Everything worked, Just didn't want to play nice with 720p which is a must for me

ew · 2013-02-26 20:19:24

james0610 wrote:

Heard lots about people with problems on new kernel. I dont think mine was kernel related. Everything worked, Just didn't want to play nice with 720p which is a must for me

Sure, I understand that choppy video in 720p is a dealbreaker. Perhaps it was a graphics driver issue?

CrunchBang Linux

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#2126 2013-02-23 15:44:30

Re: Distro-hoppers Anonymous

#2127 2013-02-23 16:14:47

Re: Distro-hoppers Anonymous

#2128 2013-02-23 17:09:07

Re: Distro-hoppers Anonymous

#2129 2013-02-23 17:33:47

Re: Distro-hoppers Anonymous

#2130 2013-02-23 22:20:50

Re: Distro-hoppers Anonymous

#2131 2013-02-24 02:40:04

Re: Distro-hoppers Anonymous

#2132 2013-02-24 18:48:32

Re: Distro-hoppers Anonymous

#2133 2013-02-24 19:13:47

Re: Distro-hoppers Anonymous

#2134 2013-02-24 20:29:42

Re: Distro-hoppers Anonymous

#2135 2013-02-25 14:50:36

Re: Distro-hoppers Anonymous

#2136 2013-02-25 16:52:52

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#2137 2013-02-25 19:42:38

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#2138 2013-02-25 20:22:53

Re: Distro-hoppers Anonymous

#2139 2013-02-26 01:36:16

Re: Distro-hoppers Anonymous

#2140 2013-02-26 02:16:24

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#2141 2013-02-26 02:31:03

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#2142 2013-02-26 02:39:04

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#2143 2013-02-26 02:43:25

Re: Distro-hoppers Anonymous

#2144 2013-02-26 12:31:25

Re: Distro-hoppers Anonymous

#2145 2013-02-26 14:19:47

Re: Distro-hoppers Anonymous

#2146 2013-02-26 16:15:42

Re: Distro-hoppers Anonymous

#2147 2013-02-26 16:17:24

Re: Distro-hoppers Anonymous

#2148 2013-02-26 17:44:16

Re: Distro-hoppers Anonymous

#2149 2013-02-26 19:00:15

Re: Distro-hoppers Anonymous

#2150 2013-02-26 20:19:24

Re: Distro-hoppers Anonymous

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