[NBLUG/talk] Which Distro?

matt matt at cfxnetworks.com
Sun May 13 00:26:54 PDT 2007


On Saturday 12 May 2007 16:47:06 Mark Janes wrote:
> Peter Lutz wrote:
> > Good Morning.
> >
> > I'm trying to decide between Ubuntu and Debian for a new
> > AMD64 X2 Athlon system.  I've gotten Ubuntu installed, but
> > it very quickly broke when I tried to change a setting in
> > Gnome and metacity disappeared.  A kludge fixed it, because
> > I couldn't find where metacity is supposed to start in the
> > gdm startup series.  I tried to get a movie player going
> > with some success.  I can play give-away DVDs, an old movie,
> > but new movies give me strange green blocks (with about half
> > an hour of messing around).  So there are some issues with
> > Ubuntu, or perhaps 64 bits in general.
>
> While SuSE seems to be the best distro for my Intel-based 64-bit system
> (a conclusion I came to after trying several, including Ubuntu, Redhat,
> Slackware and Debian) that might be due to the fact that I'm so used to
> it. I've discovered that many applications have yet to be recompiled for
> 64-bit machines and the ones that are often are for slightly older
> versions of the distro (e.g., Jahshaka, a video-editing program, only
> has a precompiled package for SUSE 10.1, though the lastest release
> version of openSuSE is 10.3). As for the playing of DVDs, you might look
> to see that the necessary libraries are 64-bit; even then it might still
> cause problems. I can play almost any movie in mplayer, but the output
> at fullscreen only fills about one-third of the screen.
>
> > I don't get as far with Debian.  A net install does not
> > produce a working X window system.  That was true for
> > Ubuntu also, but the 2.6.20 kernel on Ubuntu patched well
> > with the nVidia patch for my new 8500GT video card.  This
> > looks like a problem for Debian, as the kernel sources for
> > their 2.6.18 kernel don't seem to support a card this new.
> > Perhaps I'll just need a new kernel entirely.
>
> If possible you might try a CD/DVD install. Even that might fail you: I
> tried to install Redhat, and it insisted on display settings which were
> out of range for my monitor. I tried several times to get it to work but
> I finally gave up and tested another distro.
>
> > The Ubuntu forums are not very high level, but the Debian
> > mailing lists are a bit difficult to navigate.
> >
> > I currently have running two headless Ubuntu servers, an
> > Ubuntu 6.06LTS workstation and a Debian Unstable workstation.
> > I have used Slackware and Red Hat in the distant past, so
> > I'm not new to Linux, just slow.
> > Any suggestions would be appreciated.
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Peter
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > talk mailing list
> > talk at nblug.org
> > http://nblug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
>
> IIWY, I'd get some CD or DVD rewritable disks and download various
> distros, starting with those which explicitly have 64-bit versions, then
> moving on to others such as Slackware if you have no luck with the
> aforementioned 64-bit distros. Also, try typing into google the term
> "hacking <distroname>" and see where that leads. In the case of
> OpenSuSE, there are several articles that can tell you how to get  a lot
> of multimedia stuff working, including some possible help with nVidia
> cards.
>
> Hope this helps ;)
>
> Mark Janes

I'd personally recommend Kubuntu. It uses KDE over Gnome, and as a side 
effect, also uses Xine rather than Gstreamer for media (a good thing). To get 
all of your multimedia working, install the Mediabuntu repository (search 
Google for it), and then open up `adept_manager` and 
install "libxine1-ffmpeg", "w32codecs", and "libdvdcss2" for all of your 
multimedia needs. DVDs should play flawlessly in Kaffeine, and you won't ever 
have any problems with KWin (KDE's equivalent to Metacity) disappearing.

Oh, and the people in #kubuntu and #kde are extremely nice if you ever need 
help.

-- 
Salud,
Matt
matt at cfxnetworks.com

Your Fortune:
<Knghtbrd> Overfiend - BTW, after we've discovered X takes all of 1.4 GIGS
           to build, are you willing admit that X is bloatware?  =>
<Overfiend> KB: there is a 16 1/2 minute gap in my answer
<acf> knghtbrd: evidence exists that X is only the *2nd* worst windowing
      system ;)



More information about the talk mailing list