The *nix cat fight thread. No, I really just want opinions ;-)

[InTheSand]

Another vote here for Ubuntu, using it at the moment, and have had it on my server PC since the 5.x releases (used to use Fedora/Red Hat before that, then Mandrake before that, and originally Slackware).

Great OS, fantastic "one-click" repository of tonnes of software, and the multimedia CODECs, etc, are just a few steps away (search for "Automatix" and "Easy Ubuntu" for scripts that install the essentials automatically - including the multimedia stuff, wine, Acrobat Reader, RealPlayer, DVD player, etc).

And coupled with the free VMWare Server, it makes a great AROS testing platform!

 - Ali

[InTheSand]

Hmmm... Gentoo sounds interesting - what I assume is the "base" install came on a recent magazine cover DVD so I might give it a go on a spare (or virtual) machine...

I do like Ubuntu, though, for its ease of use and that everything just works with the minimum of fuss. But I'm not afraid of the command line!

I remember the days of installing Slackware from floppies on a 486SX laptop, watching X and fvwm struggle to launch (in monochrome!) with 4Mb RAM and 16Mb of swap!!!, and recompiling just the kernel, which took forever...

Have you (d0pefish) had any other Linux distros on your Athlon-based machine to compare the speed vs Gentoo?

My Linux machine runs the usual basics of Apache, MySQL, PHP and Samba, plus the VMWare server software, as well as being used for general purpose web browsing (Firefox), email (Thunderbird) and office stuff (OpenOffice)...

Not sure if I'd benefit from going to Gentoo - about the most CPU-intensive stuff I run (aside from VMWare when it's busy) are the X screensavers!!!

 - Ali