I’m currently running Fedora Core 5 on my home machine. FC6 is out; following a sage reader suggestion, I’m going to reinstall the OS (in a larger drive) rather than do a simple upgrade.
Which means that I could almost as easily switch distros. So: stick to FC6, or switch to Ubuntu? I’m actually quite happy with Fedora Core, and I know where everything is. (Whereas I always have to poke around when I use a debian-based system.) But lots of people are really happy with Ubuntu, and it seems to have legs. (I’m willing to consider other distros, but I’d be shocked if I went with anything else.)
Background: the architecture is x86_64; it’s not a laptop, so I don’t care about wireless or sleep. (Well, I don’t care too much – I do occasionally run Linux on laptops, so I wouldn’t complain if that stuff worked.) My base criteria:
- I don’t want to switch distros for the next several years.
- I want regular new OS releases, no less frequent than, say, once a year.
- I want a constant stream of automatic updates. (Actually, if this could remove the need for new releases, so much the better, but I don’t think anybody’s there yet.)
- I want it to be painless to install new software by using
yumorapt-getor their moral equivalent.
I’m not sure exactly what I want on top of the base criteria; it should look nice, it should be easy to use, there should be a sensible choice of default software available.
Recommendations?
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Also, if you vote for Ubuntu, does it matter too much if I pick the desktop or server versions? I do play around with Apache and MySQL some, so I’m leaning towards server; but I assume that getting from one to the other is a matter of a few apt-get installs, so it probably doesn’t matter too much.
10/25/2006 @ 9:22 pm
Addendum to what I said before: make sure to put /var/spool/mail on the “home” disk. Tony Coates is doing much the same thing, and he decided to make the second disk /opt and have /home and /usr/local under it, on the grounds that it’s a natural assumption that everything under /home is a user directory, and you don’t want user directories named “opt” and “local” particularly.
I can’t comment on the battle of the distros: my distro these days is Cygwin. There is an awful lot of stuff out there already packaged for Debian, to be sure, though alien is your friend if you want to install much of it into an RPM-based system (it converts packages from and to RPM, Debian, and tarball formats).
10/26/2006 @ 6:12 am
I vote for Ubuntu. You would love the power of Debian’s apt package management system. I don’t think there is much difference between the server install or a desktop install. You can always go from one to the other through apt-get.
10/29/2006 @ 11:08 pm
I would suggest staying with what you are familiar with, unless you really feel like learning the differences between /etc layout. Honestly, I can think of many things that seem more worthwhile to do with your life. If you like to “play around with stuff”, I would consider using Xen. I think it is in the latest fedora release, have not noticed it in Edgy Eft yet.
If you decide on Ubuntu, stay away from Edgy Eft for at least a couple of weeks. Both installation and upgrades seem to be a little flaky in the initial release. There are no real differences between server and client versions, only the set of packages that the installation process installs. I prefer an extremely basic initial installation, adding packages as I need them.
10/30/2006 @ 1:27 pm
I think that LVM means that I don’t have to worry too much about how to label the second disk: I should be able to create and resize partitions on the fly, to meet my needs. I haven’t actually tried doing that yet, though.
10/31/2006 @ 10:54 pm
[…] She likes using computers, and wants to use both of them. So she’s quite frustrated that the mac is in for repairs (and taking longer than Apple had led me to believe) and that I’m still not letting her use the Linux box; my excuse for the latter is that I want to switch to Ubuntu first, and I have some things I need to do before doing that (rearrange filesystems, burn an Ubuntu DVD), and it would be easier to burn a DVD if my Mac were back. If it takes much longer, though, I’ll find another way: I do approve of Miranda using Linux, after all. […]
1/20/2007 @ 3:57 pm