Tell me whats your flavour.

TenLeftFingers

I was going to post a poll on what flavour of linux / unix everybody uses, until I realised that there are over 100 at least

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/archive/8/2002/07/3/26189


So instead, I'd like to hear what distro / flavour everybody uses, and more importantly why you use it. What does it have that the others don't that appeals to you?

Looking forward to any replies,
regards,
merlin_bar

oscarBravo

Debian: apt-get. Gotta love it.

Both my home servers have Debian Sid running.

One of these days I'll get my stuff together and get Windows off this machine too.

Capt'n Midnight

it's Debian - and looks very like windows

BSD is good for the firewalls

sunbeam

I use Knoppix.

It has given a new lease of life to an old laptop with a dead hard drive. I'm new to linux, but so far so good...

fisty

debian.
clearly kicks all others arses.

apt-get rules.

Typedef

Slackware.

Sometimes Gentoo (which has portage)...

Emboss

FreeBSD

Well organised, ports collection. I haven't tried many distro's of linux besides RedHat and I think it's turned me off for life

quozl

debian

dahamsta

Red Hat. Ease of use.

adam

Robbo

Mandrake on the desktop, for it is easy to use and looks nice.

Smoothwall for the Router because it does everything I want it to, has a nice web interface and suits my current hardware setup.

Debian for a "server" project that's currently in bits. Chose this to learn a thing or two and because hardware constraints were forcing me towards a more spartan distro.

padraigmyers

Red Hat, installs smoothly, ease-of-use, and is usually pretty up-to-date.

Ronan|Raven

Was using Redhat I then decided to do the hdd install of Knoppix and have been pleased with it.

Typedef

Hmm.

I use Slackware on my desktop.
Red Hat, on management sanctioned File/Web Servers, but, when I have have the choice I use Slackware there too.

When doing new installs for people, to get them familiar with Linux, I tend to use Mandrake.

When doing end-luser friendly firewall installs I tend to user IpCop.

That said. If I was building a Webserver and had total control over what software was used, OpenBSD would be the OS. It would be firewalled and perferably guarded by several large men, with baseball bats...

Then I'd either use FreeBSD for a firewall or Slackware with iptables, depending on which firewall got the best reviews and was said to have least vulnerabilites.

Knoppix, is for girls tbh.

Gerry

Currently using debian 3.0/unstable on my laptop, its working pretty well. Only thing that won't work is dvd, I've tried all the common players at this stage. apt-get is nice, but I think I may go to freebsd 5.0 next week when I get a new hdd, or at least setup dual boot and compare the two. At home, I use freebsd, but can't use it full time yet because theres no support for my isdn ta.

padraigmyers

I have Red Hat 8.0 on my laptop, and I have no problems at all with it. Sound card,
DVD, CD writer, touchpad, USB mouse etc all work fine, its got dual boot to
Windows XP using GRUB as the boot loader. I would definetly reccomend it. It took
about 2 hours from starting the installation to have a full working system on the
network at work, detected all my hardware perfectly. By the way I am using a DELL
2.4GHz P4, 512Mb RAM SmartPC Laptop, just for reference.

leeroybrown

Debian Stable on two multiuser Servers (nothing else compares imho) and on my home Workstation.

Stark

Mandrake at home. Nice, up to date, has debian-like package management, things work the way I expect them to, comes with Apache 2.0.x with working php/perl modules etc. that you don't have to compile in (www.advx.org), very high performance (faster than gentoo for kde).

Use Redhat at work because they make us :-) But in fairness, Redhat 9 is quite nice in my opinion, I hated the previous red hats. Plus I can install Ximian Desktop 2 on it. (although support for mandrake is on its way). Hate redhat's package management though. Given the choice between redhat and mandrake though - mandrake hands down.

Pissing about with a solaris 8 desktop box. God I hate solaris. Installed GNOME 2.0 on it because I hated CDE (but for gods sake why can't 2.2 be available). Tried installing a decent web browser on it, but you need about 50 operating system patches to get mozilla to work, plus gtk+ libraries etc. (the solaris compiled version of mozilla on mozilla.org is gtk+1.2 compiled, and the gnome 2.0 distro doesn't contain backwards compatibility libraries). Tried re-compiling mozilla from source , but have no compilers or any development packages on the system. Am going to wipe Solaris and install Debian I'd say (the only decent sparc distros these days are debian and gentoo), but the damn sparc box won't let me boot off floppy and we don't have a cd burner in work (sorry that's sun's fault not unix's).

PS: Debian guy who can't play dvds, do you have css decription libraries installed? You won't get them with the default debian install.

Stark

nice thread title, have that song in my head now - "what's your flava, tell me what's your flava".

Typedef

Originally posted by k.oriordan

PS: Debian guy who can't play dvds, do you have css decription libraries installed? You won't get them with the default debian install.

What you mean the Captain_Css

Plugin for Xine?

simu

Will be installing SuSE 8.0 once I've bought my own computer.

Coz I got the distro plus some really helpful manuals(I love paper manuals) from sys admin ppl at my Uni.

Should be fun installing it!

Stark

What you mean the Captain_Css

Plugin for Xine?

Don't even think you need that. The default xine dvdnav, d4d, d5d plugin should pick up on libdvdcss if it's on your system. Might be in debian non-free or something.

ShevY

Just threw on Redhat 9 here, dual boot with XP using grub. Seems pretty easy to use. Internet was all setup first time i logged in which was nice. Lots to learn yet tho

glimmerman

RH 9 at the moment.
simple to install, simple to use, simple to hack. multimedia (like getting css and recompiling xine for dvd's and getting mp3 stuff to make xmms work) is a bit of a pain tho. also, gcc 3.2 is MUCH improved since that horrible hacked version of 3.0 in 8.0.

plus I've only ever used RH
(well except for that one minor diversion with midori linux and suse... urgh. then I converted the progear to rh and was MUCH happier)

Delphi91

SuSE fan here.

Started with Slackware, way back when..... Then went down the SuSE road and haven't looked back since. Currently running SuSE 8.1 on a Sony Vaio laptop.

Mike

RicardoSmith

I installed Mandrake 8 & 9 and thought they were just ok. Just got RH9 though and am going to try that. Haven't spent too much time with Linux yet, but I'm planning to in the future.

WizZard

FreeBSD 5.0 on my LAN server, powerful, fast, secure and pretty!!!
RedHat 9 on my laptop, switching to Debian or Slackware (or maybe FreeBSD) soon cos I'm sick of RH's package management problems.
Tinkering about with various mini-distro's for a transparent sniffer/NIDS box.

This is my first post - how'd I do??

Gerry

If you go putting FreeBSD onto your laptop let us know how you get on, I had terrible trouble trying to install it. It wouldn't create the disk slices properly, saying it couldn't find the entries in /dev. I put debian on instead, takes a bit of time for the non-expert to force the latest packages onto it, ( kde 3.1 and xfree 4.3 ) but works pretty good. My advice for debian is do not install x and kde until you have updated your apt sources.list file to the correct sources for the latest version, trying to upgrade x server and kde caused me problems.

JustHalf

Gentoo on my desktop and servers around the office (portage is very handy) and FreeBSD on the firewall (props to Phil (Gerry) for getting that working, thanks). I don't know what Gentoo is like for user-mode Linux, which I'll probably be messing around with next.

Phil, you might want to try Gentoo out on your laptop. An emerge sync ensures you have the latest ebuilds. KDE could take a while to install though

I could try building binary packages for you though, optimised to what you want (I reckon my P4 2.6 GHz might be a wee bit faster than that PII laptop of yours). Portage supports this no problem. Just give me a list of the packages you want installed, and I'll put the packages up on Minds for you.

Chaos-Engine

Debian 3.0r1/bf24

Reason: apt-get and Knoppix created love


I have it installed but OMG I would kill for some hands on help installing the X-Server as I have GeForce 3 which causes difficulties which i can not resolve of yet.
Recompiling Kernals and such is hard work for someone who is starting off. Or perhaps its a good starting point

Gerry

Yeah, I can't really afford the 4 days of downtime which building my own packages would take.

If you could build me the base system, X 4.3.whatever, KDE 3.1.whatever optimized for p3, that would be cool. Any idea what the story is with minds?

JustHalf

Nope, power cut yesterday, dunno what's happening today.

Is that not a PII you have?

Rew

SuSE 8.2 been using SuSE since 6 and wouldn't touch Red Hat with a barge poll!!

Gerry

As I keep saying, its a p3, 450mhz. coppermine.. 0.18 micron

JustHalf

Right.

minds.may.ie is down because of the stupid ARPing. Power is up in the south campus, but to get to Minds from outside requires hoping into the south campus, then to the north campus, then back again.

JustHalf

Bizarrely, psyche is up.

dloob

Libranet

It's based on the Debian Distro, but has more up to date packages.
It can take a while for a package to get into the stable branch on Debian.
But you know it's going to be stable when it gets there.

It works nicely with my radeon 9700.
I had Debian woody but after upgrading the graphics card I couldn't get X to work.
There was a lot of battling with XF86Config-4.
Libranet set it all up on install
Linux installs have come a long way, you install and it detects almost everything.
I remember trying to get devices to work back in the pre kernel module days. :ninja:

Fabre

Mandrake 9.1 (for the past 48h)

trying to get rid of that ms flavour

Kali

Debian 3.0r1 (Woody w/ 2.4 kernel)

On my workstation here in work and on 4 servers:
Gateway and caching server (iptables & squid)
Intranet (Apache, PHP, PostgreSQL)
2 file servers (both just Samba).

Love Knoppix though for testing purposes, very handy.. saves reinstalling Windows if a hardware component seems to be faulty.. if Knoppix doesn't pick it up its broken

BenH

SuSE 8.2 Pro for desktop, laptop and work servers. Simply because I can go to a customer and say - 'look at this, was this hard to install? does KDE look like a text prompt?' So far we've used it to convert over 1000 desktops from windows.

Debian for home server - playing about with OGO. Technically its wonderful, but it can be overly difficult.

Embedix on my handheld. Not much to say here, other than I Love my Zaurus

Borderware on the firewalls, basically its BSD but rebuilt with a paranoids focus on security. Scores 999999 on Nmap, against our legacy outlook exchanges 6.

Regards,

BenH

Typedef

Building a DVD box out of FreeBSD, since Nvidia have a driver which will support a sweet pci card I bought.. ( a card which has half as much ram as the ... skip rescued P2 I'm running it on!)

Windows wants to 'validate' the region on my dvd player... and ... I seem to be having dma timeout issues with the Linux kernel.. (which is probably dodgy hardware anway).

*sigh*

I have to say ... a little bit ot.

That Firebird is excellent.. faster then Galeon and Mozilla and a hell of a lot more stable.
</plug>

Crap fonts though.

JustHalf

Not on my Gentoo box.

When I did an ebuild of tetex it installed a TON of fonts, quite a few being the free Microsoft fonts (Verdana, Tahoma, etc). It shouldn't be too much of an issue finding fonts to install.

Typedef

Yeah I'm still trying to figure out how to get the sexy AA fonts in Mozilla / Dropline Gnome to display in Galeon/Firebird... with the least effort possible.

logic1

http://pryan.org/phoenix/

.logic.

Typedef

Quite true...

some illucidated individual is providing P4 optimised Firebird builds.

logic1

Originally posted by Typedef
Quite true...

some illucidated individual is providing P4 optimised Firebird builds.

With XFT support of course. I hope this "elucidates" the point.

.logic.

po0k

debian woody

Might change to knoppix for the dual-boot though.

Rebuilding the machine sometime this week if Metallica don't get in the way too much.