Suggest me an alternative to FreeBSD

[kag]

I've had FreeBSD installed on my little home server since last December and everything is going fine. Unfortunately my main computer broke down (broken video card) and I had to install X-Windows and all that on my BSD server while I was waiting for a new card. It was pretty much a pain in the ass to do anything besides Firefox.

What would be a nice alternative to FreeBSD, probably a Linux distribution, that has a nice desktop environment, but that doesn't necessarly boot in X-Windows on startup so it can stay in command line for everyday tasks when I don't need to access it. In other words, the best distribution that would be used as a web/mysql/ftp server, but that is still very usable as a desktop.

 

[n0cmonkey]

NetBSD is pretty nice.

 

[kag]

I forgot to mention that I don't necessarily need the lastest version of a distro. There's only a straight Pentium 3 500Mhz in there, with an AGP video card, a cd-rom drive plus a NIC. That's it. I don't need all the USB stuff, etc, etc. I just want speed!

 

[Red and black]

Yeah, NetBSD or OpenBSD are more bare-bones systems in the style of FreeBSD.

 

[Nothinman]

Debian.

 

[CTho9305]

I'd recommend OpenBSD if OpenOffice.org wasn't such a pain to deal with on it

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: CTho9305
I'd recommend OpenBSD if OpenOffice.org wasn't such a pain to deal with on it

I'd recommend OpenOffice, if it wasn't such a pain the butt.

 

[Wyck]

Ubuntu is mighty powerful and mighty easy. After the install edit /etc/inittab and change the default runlevel from 5 to 3 so it boots to the CLI rather than the GUI.

 

[000]

I agree Debian is a nice Linux distro that is light on system resources, and offers a command line interface on boot.

 

[Nothinman]

After the install edit /etc/inittab and change the default runlevel from 5 to 3 so it boots to the CLI rather than the GUI.

Unless the Ubuntu people have changed the default settings from Debian the default runlevel will always be 2, whether a desktop manager is installed or not. Just remove the /etc/rc2.d/S99gdm symlink and GDM won't start.

 

[htne]

Originally posted by: kag
I forgot to mention that I don't necessarily need the lastest version of a distro. There's only a straight Pentium 3 500Mhz in there, with an AGP video card, a cd-rom drive plus a NIC. That's it. I don't need all the USB stuff, etc, etc. I just want speed!

You didn't mention the amount of memory installed, which is possibly more important than the cpu speed.

If you have at least 256 megs of memory, I would recommend Slackware with KDE. If less than 256 megs, but at least 128 megabytes, perhaps VectorLinux with a lesser window manager.

 

[kag]

Originally posted by: htne

Originally posted by: kag
I forgot to mention that I don't necessarily need the lastest version of a distro. There's only a straight Pentium 3 500Mhz in there, with an AGP video card, a cd-rom drive plus a NIC. That's it. I don't need all the USB stuff, etc, etc. I just want speed!

You didn't mention the amount of memory installed, which is possibly more important than the cpu speed.

If you have at least 256 megs of memory, I would recommend Slackware with KDE. If less than 256 megs, but at least 128 megabytes, perhaps VectorLinux with a lesser window manager.

it has 512MB of memory. I guess I'll look into Slackware, I read elsewhere that it's fast even for old systems.