Recommend me a different distro than Ubuntu.

[BlueAcolyte]

Ok, I have a perfectly functional K/X/Ubuntu installation set up, everything I want to works except for MONO/.NET2.0. So I want something different to toy around with.

Requirements:
1. Must support Wine.
2. Must have drivers with 3d acceleration.
3. Supports Python.

So far I've been considering:
Zenwalk
PCLinuxOS
ForeSight Linux
CentOS
Mint

Got any choices?

 

[sourceninja]

They are all good, just pick one and go with it. I can't think of a distro that does not meet your 3 requirements.

 

[xSauronx]

can you be more specific when you say you want to toy around, or "get into" linux? how involved do you want to be in configuration? do you want to try a variety of other window managers?

 

[BlueAcolyte]

I have already used GNOME, KDE, and Xfce, can't say I like Xfce. I alternate between GNOME and KDE.
I just want a distro that most people aren't using. Go figure

 

[dennilfloss]

Elive? OpenGeu? Yamefa?

 

[Crusty]

If you want one most people don't use break out gcc and have fun

 

[BlueAcolyte]

gcc?

edit: Dennilfloss, all the distros you suggested me are based on ubuntu/debian

 

[Praetor]

Gentoo? Fedora? Slackware?

If you really want to learn the guts, try linux from scratch.

 

[SleepWalkerX]

Check out OpenSUSE. Ubuntu is a great distribution with a lot of development and community support, but when it comes to developers I love the OpenSUSE team. OpenSUSE just feels like a professionally made distro, no offence to Ubuntu. And as much as some people might hate yast its gotten tremendously better when it comes to speed and imho its one of the best administration tools.

Version 11 is coming out very soon and I'm really excited. Performance in almost everything has been drastically improved (package management, installation, startup, etc), they're including the new KDE4 (along with KDE3 if you prefer it, oh and they offer XFCE during installation as well), and this doesn't include all the cool stuff already included in 10.3 like giver, one-click install, kiwi, and easy-to-add community repositories.

edit: Oh and since they're the team that created Mono you can assume that their support for it would be at least somewhat decent.

 

[xSauronx]

Originally posted by: BlueAcolyte
I have already used GNOME, KDE, and Xfce, can't say I like Xfce. I alternate between GNOME and KDE.
I just want a distro that most people aren't using. Go figure

from this it sounds like you want a desktop environment or window manager that isnt used as much as kde/gnome/xfce

ubuntu has plenty in the repositories. search "window manager" in synaptic

try fluxbox, icewm, whatever comes up and see what you like. keep in mind, outside of the other 3, anything else will take some work to configure your way, and will not come as a complete environment

 

[Dravic]

Originally posted by: SleepWalkerX
Check out OpenSUSE. Ubuntu is a great distribution with a lot of development and community support, but when it comes to developers I love the OpenSUSE team. OpenSUSE just feels like a professionally made distro, no offence to Ubuntu. And as much as some people might hate yast its gotten tremendously better when it comes to speed and imho its one of the best administration tools.

Version 11 is coming out very soon and I'm really excited. Performance in almost everything has been drastically improved (package management, installation, startup, etc), they're including the new KDE4 (along with KDE3 if you prefer it, oh and they offer XFCE during installation as well), and this doesn't include all the cool stuff already included in 10.3 like giver, one-click install, kiwi, and easy-to-add community repositories.

edit: Oh and since they're the team that created Mono you can assume that their support for it would be at least somewhat decent.

I agree, as far as a workstation OS goes OpenSUSE is very good. I'm awaiting verion 11 as well, and will be moving both my work workstation(currently 10.2, and this workstation (ubuntu 7.10) over. If you really want to learn what linux is about under the hood then try gentoo. It will be painfull, and rewarding all at the same time.

ubuntu has been great so far, but its trying to be everything for everyone. openSUSE is bit more of a workstation as opposed to a desktop os, if that makes any sense.

 

[dennilfloss]

Originally posted by: BlueAcolyte
gcc?

edit: Dennilfloss, all the distros you suggested me are based on ubuntu/debian

But some of those use Enlightenment instead of Gnome or KDE. Just thought that might be different enough for you. It sure looks purty.

 

[BlueAcolyte]

I dl'ed zenwalk 5.0 and i'm gonna try and dual-boot it with Ubuntu on the same disk as well as having a vista disk.

 

[sourceninja]

gentoo really didn't teach me anything more about linux then debain or ubuntu did. However it did force me to get VERY good at following directions and typing things in exactly as they were written.

Now LFS, that taught me a lot about linux.

 

[Tbirdkid]

yep, lfs is one that noone else is using, its your version, that you maintain, and build. you can name it what you want, and you can do with it what ever you want...

 

[BlueAcolyte]

Hey, guys, I have a problem.

I'm using GParted from an Ubuntu 8.04 live CD to try and resize my Ubuntu partition from 35GB to 20GB, leaving 15GB for Zenwalk. However the operation never complete, giving me an error of "filesystem is already "(some number)" blocks long, after checking the filesystem for errors the second time.

Got any alternatives?

 

[Tbirdkid]

Im not a gparted guy, i do know that the more you alter the filesystem you are asking for trouble. Do yourself a favor if you can, put your data on a dvd, or on a mountable partition, and delete your os partitions, then divide them. Just my 2 cents...

 

[BlueAcolyte]

No, I have a standard installation of a linux distro, there's the OS partition and the swap. I just want to shrink one partition and create a new one. I suppose I could backup all my data to my vista drive and attempt to start over, but I don't want to do that unless I have to.

 

[Dravic]

The first time I shunk a xp partition to put fedora core on it for a security conference I used qtparted. May want to try that one also.


I just used gparted, but that was to destroy the default hfs filesystem on a 750g my book so i could put reiserfs on it for my linux workstation. the error doesnt sound familiar.

 

[xSauronx]

Originally posted by: BlueAcolyte
No, I have a standard installation of a linux distro, there's the OS partition and the swap. I just want to shrink one partition and create a new one. I suppose I could backup all my data to my vista drive and attempt to start over, but I don't want to do that unless I have to.

you have a nice rig, why not just virtualize to test out new distros until you finalize on one?

 

[SleepWalkerX]

Originally posted by: BlueAcolyte
Hey, guys, I have a problem.

I'm using GParted from an Ubuntu 8.04 live CD to try and resize my Ubuntu partition from 35GB to 20GB, leaving 15GB for Zenwalk. However the operation never complete, giving me an error of "filesystem is already "(some number)" blocks long, after checking the filesystem for errors the second time.

Got any alternatives?

What filesystem do you have? If its ext2 or ext3 and you're just shrinking then just use the resize2fs command. Its pretty simple to use. For example,

sudo resize2fs /dev/sda1 20G

will resize partition /dev/sda1 to be 20 gigabytes. Of course you need to run this from a livecd of some sorts or basically while /dev/sda1 is not mounted.

 

[BlueAcolyte]

yea, it's ext3, for ubuntu. I'm not that good with terminal. I can do some FDisk, apt-get, sudo, cd, mkfs, not much else. Thanks for telling me.

 

[soonerproud]

Originally posted by: BlueAcolyte
yea, it's ext3, for ubuntu. I'm not that good with terminal. I can do some FDisk, apt-get, sudo, cd, mkfs, not much else. Thanks for telling me.

I suggest you start getting familiar with the terminal if you really want to get more into linux. Since you are somewhat familiar with Ubuntu, you should try Debian. Setting up Debian will teach you a lot about Linux and will give a lot of command line experience.

 

[trmiv]

Mandriva 2008 Spring is really nice

 

[aceO07]

Slackware is great if you have the time to play with it and set it up. I remember years ago spending days getting video card, wireless and other stuff working for it. I assume that it's better with hardware now, but it's still great to learn about configuring Linux.