I don’t know what gave me the idea, but I’m once again attempting a move to GNU/Linux on my primary machine and after a rocky start, I’m thinking it just might work this time. I’m now in to my second week and things are going fairly smooth; it wasn’t easy however…
First I tried out Fedora Core 2 test 1. No sound, constantly crashed, basically unusable. To make matters worse, I neglected to look at the advanced options at the bit where it installed the bootloader and it nuked my XP installation, but I’ll get to that in a minute.
Needless to say, FC2 didn’t last too long. I’m a sucker for the bleeding edge, but I’m also really lazy and I don’t want to deal with too much hassle. I figured that it was a test version and I should probably revert to the FC1 release that I had already downloaded and burned about a month before.
On to Fedora Core 1. Installed fine and seemed pretty nice. I really like YUM, makes installing packages a breeze and it’s great to be able to update everything in one command. Configuring XFree86 to use Xinerama for the first was kind of a hassle, but I got it working after a few searches.
My main problems were with GNOME. Nautilus crashed frequently and it had kind of crappy multiple monitor support among some other things that I can’t remember now. On a whole, the problems were compelling enough for me to try out some other window managers.
I’ve heard lots of good things about Enlightenment, crazy themes, really configurable, and a guaranteed hit with the ladies, so I figured I’d give it a spin. Definately configurable and I’m sure the ladies would love it, but those themes were a little too crazy. I couldn’t find a single one that had a legible menu and didn’t make me want to listen to KMFDM. After about 2 hours of trying to make a usable theme I remembered how much time I had already wasted trying to get a usable system and gave up.
Surely KDE would work! Installed and ran it for about thirty seconds. Redhat definately has something against KDE; it was undescribably ugly.
Somewhere in the middle of my FC1 usage, before the window manager bit, I went over to Zoe’s house to use some of his extra space to temporarily store some stuff (~120GB of crap) that I couldn’t get at since, unbeknownst to me, the Intel SATA RAID controller on my motherboard is a software RAID implementation that, of course, Linux doesn’t have a driver for.
As I mentioned, I killed my XP installation installing Fedora. This wouldn’t be too big a deal except somewhere in the process of trying to recover said XP installation, I messed up my RAID 0 array. If you don’t know about RAID, level 0 is the one without the all important redundant part; data is split between two or more drives. So after putting a temporary Windows installation on an extra drive and installing all the drivers, it said that my hard drive (drives really) was two-hundred forty gigs of unpartitioned space. Not at all what I was expecting.
I think I handled myself fairly well considering all of the data I may have lost. I was kind of in shock, but Zoe was there to be the voice of reason and he started us looking for a data recovery program. A few trips to the bad part of town later, I found something that looked like it might do the job.
It did do the (really freakin’ long) job fairly well and I recovered just about everything. Well I think I did, I haven’t had the chance yet to go through everything.
Back to the issue at hand. I was so appalled with Fedora’s KDE implementation that I decided to try another distro. SuSE was next on my list.
They don’t offer downloadable ISOs, so I burned their boot CD to do an FTP installation. It wouldn’t get past the detecting drives bit. Same thing with the boot floppies. Next!
I’ve since been informed that this may be possible to get around by disabling the power managment options in the BIOS.
I don’t need this much hassle in my life.
Mandrake 9.2 was already running happily in the living room so I figured I’d give it a try. I had used an earlier version in my last attempt and, not to sound uncool, it was very user friendly.
I’m going to leave my full review for another time, but suffice to say that I am very pleased with Mandrake.
Several minor problems, including their screwy menu system that frequently breaks KDE’s menus, not too many packages, and some other wierdness, prompted me to try yet another distro…
I had tried to install Debian before and wasn’t quite able to get around their funky installer; so when I heard that they were testing a nice installer with hardware detection and other conveniences, I decided to give it a shot.
The actual installation was really simple. Their new installer skips over all the stuff I seem to have trouble with and gets the system up and running with relative ease. Getting it to load XFree86 proved to be a little troublesome, however. I ended up having to get 4.3 from unstable and get a 2.6 kernel before I could really use anything. Just like everyone says though, apt is simply the best package management system ever and made upgrading a breeze.
I’ve been running Debian for about a month now and it’s by far the best distro for me. It has enough difficulty to be interesting, but not so much that it’s unusable; apt’s package repository has almost everything I need (even Firefox!); and I can finally get back to work.