Leaving Vista Which way to go?

[sourceninja]

Recently my work gave me a copy of windows vista buisness. I installed it and gave it a try. Everything worked fairly well with the exception of some video issues in games (get with it already nvidia.)

However slowly but surely I am beginning to miss my good old linux. Last night a friend wanted some help on some gtk# development and I struggled to find a quick easy way to work with him. I miss using bluefish, I miss bash scripts, and I miss playing around with my system and submitting bug reports. In any case I've decided to move back to linux. Nothing really wrong with vista, but its just not ready for my requirements.

I've thought a lot about it, when I last ditched linux to test vista I was trying to use kde over gnome to see if I could improve my workflow. Because of this I think I am looking for a kde oriented distro. I was working in ubuntu and gentoo (the gentoo was really just for testing and playing with amd64 linux, nobody else seems to have a system that easy to use for amd64).

So now I'm torn, i'm not sure if I should go with debian etch or kubuntu edgy for my system. I've been finding ubuntu's direction a little limiting as of recently, with lots of suger coating and focus on the new linux user. These are good things, but I'm wondering if I would not gain more power by going with debian.

Am I just imagining that debain has more software packages supported and more 3rd party repository support? Is it really worth the extra effort of installing debain and setting it up vs just installing kubuntu?

 

[Nothinman]

Am I just imagining that debain has more software packages supported and more 3rd party repository support? Is it really worth the extra effort of installing debain and setting it up vs just installing kubuntu?

Debian has more supported packages, essentially everything in Ubuntu+universe+multiverse and a little bit more I think, but more 3rd party repos is questionable and that shouldn't really matter anyway. The only one I really use is http://www.debian-multimedia.org/ and that's maintained by a DD so there's little risk, I'd be leery about trusting any other repos. And there's very little extra work involved in installing Debian, the etch installer is pretty simple (the partitioning can be confusing though) and installing KDE is just a matter of 'aptitude install kde' after the fact.

 

[Robor]

Is there an advantage of Debian over Ubuntu or vice versa? Not trying to thread crap or hijack either. Just curious as I understand Ubuntu is based off of Debian.

 

[Nothinman]

I like running Debian sid because it's constantly updated, I don't have to mess with major upgrades every 6 months and I still get the latest software. With Ubuntu you either sit at the current release only getting security updates until they make the next release in 6 months or you try running the next release while it's in development and end up fixing your system all of the time. And I don't know how Ubuntu handle's bugs in packages in universe and multiverse, in Debian all of those packages are supported.

 

[sourceninja]

One thing I noticed about debian, it does not protect you like ubuntu does. This is not a bad thing at all, but it is true. I couldn't get my video card to work with the nvidia driver, so I start looking around and I notice a /lib64 folder (I did not install amd64 debian). Turns out when I used aptitude to install a better kernel I should of read the description. Debian let me install linux-image-amd64 on a 32bit build of debian. While I can see the advantages of running a 64bit kernel with 32bit userspace a novice user would never figure that out. Of course after installing that kernel, new programs all started coming in 64 bit and the system was slowly destroying itself. Lucky I caught my mistake quickly so I could resolve it before it became out of hand.

 

[doog519]

Myself I have become pretty dependent on linux machines.
I love the multiple desktops and not really having to worry about virus's
They do everything that I need them to.

Right now I am running Suse 10.2 64bit and it is a solid and stable distro.
And I am running KDE and Gnome Desktops. I have them both loaded and I use which ever one I am in the mood for at the time.


I have tried running Ubuntu 64 bit. But it wasn't near as stable and switched back to 32 bit in that.

I know a lot of people don't really care for Suse but it is a stable 64 bit distro.
It might be worth a try.

 

[Nothinman]

Of course after installing that kernel, new programs all started coming in 64 bit and the system was slowly destroying itself.

That makes no sense at all. If you installed i386 there's no way it started grabbing AMD64 packages and a 64-bit kernel can run 32-bit apps just fine.

 

[Pwnbroker]

Well, my question is, considering the system specs in my sig, what distro would I have the least amount of trouble with. My 2 WD drives are currently set to stripe raid, and I would be dual booting Vista. Or would I? Has anybody found any trouble dual booting Vista?

On my last computer, I installed FC 3, and had some trouble with a DSL modem. It wouldn't recognize it at all connected via usb, and so I had to have it connected via usb for Windows and eth0 for Linux. Also, FC3 would not recognize anything usb related, printer, thumb drives or usb keyboard and mouse. I tried to find answers but documentation was seriously lacking.

I want to move to Linux, but the state of it when I tried it was not conducive for new users. Also, games are seriously lacking in Lilnux. Maybe when I get out of school in 2 months, I should start a Linux gaming company

 

[Nothinman]

Ubuntu is the big one these days, OpenSuSE and FC both have a lot of fans too but I can't stand either of them. You should be able to find answers to just about all of your problems on the Ubuntu wiki and forums, they've got pretty much all of the desktop stuff covered these days.

USB stuff usually "just works" these days, printers are the common exception though because most of the cheap printers are absolute crap no matter what OS you use. Why do you even use a USB DSL modem if you can connect via ethernet? I would assume it would be less hassle to use the ethernet in both OSes?

As for games, WINE/Cedega or dualbooting are still your only real choices. But now that Vista comes with OpenAL that's one less obstacle for portable games so things might get better in the future.

 

[traderonline]

as a newbie i prefer Ubuntu

 

[Pwnbroker]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
Why do you even use a USB DSL modem if you can connect via ethernet? I would assume it would be less hassle to use the ethernet in both OSes?

One thing good about usb, if I ever have the need to quickly disconnect, there's always the usb ports on the front of the pc. Plus I think I had trouble with the DSL installation with ethernet at the time.

How does Ubuntu fare with wireless cards by the way?

 

[Nothinman]

One thing good about usb, if I ever have the need to quickly disconnect, there's always the usb ports on the front of the pc. Plus I think I had trouble with the DSL installation with ethernet at the time.

I can't fathom a reason why you'd have to go "OMG I need to disconnect" and need to have it happen within the next 2s. I can't imagine that the time it takes to open the network control panel and disable the interface is going to make or break anything.

How does Ubuntu fare with wireless cards by the way?

Just like any other distro will, it depends heavily on the chipset on the card. Some will work right out of the box, some will require that you download some firmware and some will require a lot more hoops to jump through.

 

[Pwnbroker]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
I can't fathom a reason why you'd have to go "OMG I need to disconnect" and need to have it happen within the next 2s. I can't imagine that the time it takes to open the network control panel and disable the interface is going to make or break anything.

Here's an example. I used to play on Yahoo pool a lot, and some crackers had hacks that would let them bomb you off the server. I seriously doubt that's the extent of what they were doing though, because they would cause several IM messages to pop up, like 50 or more, and if you didn't catch it quickly, it would lock up your whole computer. I'm sure there were some kind of buffer overflows going on there also. There were many self-proclaimed hackers on yahoo games who would threaten to hack you for whatever reason they deemed appropriate.

 

[Shamrock]

SimplyMEPIS ftw!!!

The new Mepis has Beryl installed by default. 6.5 just went RC1 last night It is also ready for the new time change sunday.

 

[Nothinman]

Here's an example. I used to play on Yahoo pool a lot, and some crackers had hacks that would let them bomb you off the server. I seriously doubt that's the extent of what they were doing though, because they would cause several IM messages to pop up, like 50 or more, and if you didn't catch it quickly, it would lock up your whole computer. I'm sure there were some kind of buffer overflows going on there also. There were many self-proclaimed hackers on yahoo games who would threaten to hack you for whatever reason they deemed appropriate.

So why not just figure out what they're doing and fix it? I could understand them being able to knock you off the server or possibly even crash whatever plugin Yahoo pool uses, but if your machine locks up from whatever they're doing you have more serious problems.

 

[Pwnbroker]

What they are doing is making hundreds of accounts with similar names, queueing them up with instant messages then bombarding you with ims. Yahoo has since fixed this, from what I hear, but this is not the meat of the issue.

I like having a quick disconnect option available for such cases as this. At the time this was happening, it happened so quick and locked your computer up so well that you didn't have time to open contol panel and all that. A quick disconnect was the safest option.

 

[sourceninja]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Of course after installing that kernel, new programs all started coming in 64 bit and the system was slowly destroying itself.

That makes no sense at all. If you installed i386 there's no way it started grabbing AMD64 packages and a 64-bit kernel can run 32-bit apps just fine.

Try it, I used the netinstall cd nightly etch build. It installed a linux-image-486 kernel package. Everything worked fine. I then did aptitude search linux-image and it showed me a 686, amd64, k7, and 386 packages. At this point I checked to make sure I was not running a 64 bit kernel by runing uname -a which showed I was not. I then checked my /usr directory to make sure I did not have a /lib64. I did not. So I figured hell 64bit packages should not be showing up in this list, so amd64 is the kernel to use. So I ran aptitude install linux-image-amd64 and rebooted. Everything worked fine after rebooting. I then installed xorg with aptitude install xserver-xorg and kde with aptitude install kde-core. I then rebooted. KDM came up fine and I could log in.

After I reached this point, I installed a few other kde packages I wanted. I then set out to install the nvidia driver to improve performance and allow me to play games. As I was using a standard kernel, all this required was adding non-free and contrib to my sources and doing an aptitude update then installing nvidia-glx which installed the kernel modules and then reconfiguring my xorg.conf. I did this, and X did not come back up. At this point I started troubleshooting. After about 5 minutes I ran a uname -a and discovered it was now x86_64 and not i386. I then did a ls of /usr and found /lib and /lib64.

So there you have it, somehow debian allowed me to install a 64 bit kernel on a 32bit install. You can retrace my steps if you would like to do so.

 

[Nothinman]

At the time this was happening, it happened so quick and locked your computer up so well that you didn't have time to open contol panel and all that. A quick disconnect was the safest option.

My point still remains that if your computer locks up from getting a lot of IMs at once then something else is seriously wrong with your setup. Pulling the network connection is simply a bandaid on a bigger problem.

So there you have it, somehow debian allowed me to install a 64 bit kernel on a 32bit install. You can retrace my steps if you would like to do so.

I don't deny that because that's a valid setup, but what won't happen is that you won't start getting all of your 32-bit packages replaced with 64-bit ones just because you installed a 64-bit kernel. Apt would still be setup for the i386 repo so the only possible 64-bit packages that you might get are kernel modules and things that have to interface directly with the kernel. I just tested this by installing i386 etch and adding the amd64 kernel and all of my packages are still i386 and installing an additional one also brought in the i386 package. I can't do everything you did though because I'm doing this in VMWare, but the difference is minimal and the only problem I could see is the nVidia driver not liking the fact that you're using a AMD64 kernel and i386 glx libraries but that still wouldn't cause what you claim happened.

 

[daniel49]

Ninja: PClinux OS is presently doing bug testing for pclos 2007 tr3.

Sounds like you might enjoy being part of it?
http://www.pclinuxos.com/news.php
its a great community and distro.

 

[Brazen]

Ah, I'm back to XP after trying Vista and I am loving it (and I do have a full, valide Vista Ultimate license). I would have gone with Ubuntu on this machine, but it's my one gaming machine.

 

[sourceninja]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

At the time this was happening, it happened so quick and locked your computer up so well that you didn't have time to open contol panel and all that. A quick disconnect was the safest option.

My point still remains that if your computer locks up from getting a lot of IMs at once then something else is seriously wrong with your setup. Pulling the network connection is simply a bandaid on a bigger problem.

So there you have it, somehow debian allowed me to install a 64 bit kernel on a 32bit install. You can retrace my steps if you would like to do so.

I don't deny that because that's a valid setup, but what won't happen is that you won't start getting all of your 32-bit packages replaced with 64-bit ones just because you installed a 64-bit kernel. Apt would still be setup for the i386 repo so the only possible 64-bit packages that you might get are kernel modules and things that have to interface directly with the kernel. I just tested this by installing i386 etch and adding the amd64 kernel and all of my packages are still i386 and installing an additional one also brought in the i386 package. I can't do everything you did though because I'm doing this in VMWare, but the difference is minimal and the only problem I could see is the nVidia driver not liking the fact that you're using a AMD64 kernel and i386 glx libraries but that still wouldn't cause what you claim happened.

well I did not look inside the /lib64 folder, so you are correct it could just of been modules.

 

[Nothinman]

well I did not look inside the /lib64 folder, so you are correct it could just of been modules.

Kernel modules go in /lib/modules/<kernel-version> and there's no lib64 in that path. I don't have any lib64 directories in that VM yet, but as I said I couldn't install all of the same software as you. Using apt-file I see 30 i386 packages with lib64 directories but most of them are development and debugging packages that you would have had to specifically ask for and the others like amd64-libs, fakeroot, etc won't ever be touched by anything but 64-bit processes so the only affect they would have on your 32-bit packages would be some wasted disk space.

And looking some more the only packages that put files in /lib64 instead of /usr/lib64 are lib64gcc1, lib64ncurses5, lib64readline5 and libc6-amd64 so you probably did get all of those if you tried to build your own nvidia kernel module since you'd need an AMD64 compiler environment for that. And this is to be expected and won't cause any problems so something else happened to your machine.

 

[sourceninja]

Well, what ever happened it's running fine now with a nice k7 kernel (i couldn't decide if k7 or 686 was best for amd64. I figured they are probably so close it wont matter). Everything working as expected.

I always thought lib64 was symlinked to lib and lib32 was for emulated librarys. Maybe that was gentoo though.

PClinux looks nice, I'll toss it on a spare partition. So far though debian performs like I expected it to and i'm happy.

 

[manowar821]

Originally posted by: Brazen
Ah, I'm back to XP after trying Vista and I am loving it (and I do have a full, valide Vista Ultimate license). I would have gone with Ubuntu on this machine, but it's my one gaming machine.

You're not using the vista license and disk, now?
I'll buy it from you.

 

[Nothinman]

I always thought lib64 was symlinked to lib and lib32 was for emulated librarys. Maybe that was gentoo though.

On my pure AMD64 sid system /lib64 is symlinked to /lib and /lib32 is symlinked to /emul/ia32-linux/lib. On that i386 VM /lib is a real directory and I would assume /lib64 is one too once you install one of the packages I mentioned earlier.