Distro choice

jozi

Posted this in another thread also. I was wondering if you guys can point me towards a distro.

I decided a few weeks ago after the parents complaining about their pc being slow I'd install a distro on it, after some searching for parent friendly distro's I ended up with Mint 13 (Kubuntu looks good for myself as well). Finally got round to installing it today and it seems like my parents might manage fine with it.

This got me thinking a bit more about running a distro on my own desktop but I have a few questions related to hardware and other things.

In the past I've tried to run a distro or two and found I had trouble because I had a ati gfx card. I'm using quite and old card at the moment (ati x800xl) which I probably won't replace till next year. Has linux support for ati gotten better, am I likely going to run into problems?

I've got a creative sound blaster xfi elite pro with the break out box, I'd love to have this running properly as I have the pc wired into my receiver for surround sound. I'm going to go with the assumption that it will work and is fully supported? I found creative drivers for linux but no idea how good they are. I've also just found out about Ubuntu Studio, would this be ideal to run with the xfi card?

To complicate it more I use a few adobe programs, photoshop, indesign, but mostly lightroom. While I don't think these are available for linux, I did find someone running a virtual os (windows 7) so he can run his adobe programs. How hard is this to setup and get running, is there a big impact to system performance running a virtual box?

Finally I want something that looks pretty and flashy but not tacky Better than windows, something like this or this

Any recommendation?

Johnboy1951

Use a liveCD of several distro to see which one will allow you to use your specific hardware.

You should also check their support forums in case a specific device is not supported 'out of box' but is supported by installing some package/ or other. Not everything can fit on a liveCD.

That should allow you to choose a distro that suits you and that supports your hardware.

jozi

I'll give it a try, my cap isn't going to like me this month :P

Any experience running a virtual box? Is there a noticeable performance hit?

Johnboy1951

jozi wrote: »

I'll give it a try, my cap isn't going to like me this month :P

Any experience running a virtual box? Is there a noticeable performance hit?

It depends a lot on your hardware ..... CPU & RAM ..... I suggest, if possible one CPU core and 1GB RAM ...... but less will do.

Have a look at the following distros amongst others you might try ...

Linux Mint
Mepis
PCLinuxOS

jozi

Have mint installed on the parents pc. Tried kubuntu briefly yest besides no sound it seemed ok but was only 10mins with it. I'll look into those few you mentioned.

1cpu and gig of ram won't run light room very well. It can be slow with 4gigs of ram and a amd tri-core cpu.