[NBLUG/talk] Which Distro?

[Mark Janes]

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
>
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>
>   
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


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