Zen Internet Support Forum

Ubuntu 5.10 Breezy Badger x86 on my laptop, dual-booting with XP (which I need for audio/video work).

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Paul Simpson
ZeN Technical Support Team Leader

Welcome to the fold!

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David Nelson
Team Leader
Business Support Unit
Zen Internet

Mandrake 9 then 10 then Mandriva, for the ease of installation, and hardware compatibility. Both important for a long time Window$ user. I'm still evaluating Linux so still a Windows user.

Have tried Knoppix live distro to make sure initially that Linux would work on my machine, then installed Mandrake 9 as it was the latest version back then. Recently tried Suse10 live distro, it failed to load as soon as it got to the graphics card auto setup - so I have no confidence in installing that package for real, so stuck with Mandriva.

If _everything_ was installed with an RPM type file (similar to a Windows self-install exe) and icons for the application shortcuts auto installed into the application menu system, then more people would go from Windows to Linux. Well, that, and for Linux to loose it's "only for nerds" OS tag.

Horses for courses with me.

Gentoo if I want something really flexible, yet upgradeable.

SuSE if I want something quick and easy

Ubuntu is for playing for right now.

And I do use FreeBSD on occasion, mostly for network heavy stuff, i.e. if it's pretending to be a router or firewall. The BSD TCP/IP stack is a bit faster and more stable, and ipfw is quite powerful.

I've been using SuSE for years, and it's still (just) my distro of choice, but there are clouds on the horizon. Novell seem to be interested only in their enterprise products, and OpenSuse is just a big beta test for that.
My second favourite (heading towards first) is Mepis. It's now based on Ubuntu and does what Kubuntu always promised but never really achieved. I like it.

Eric

Kubuntu 6.06 on my laptop

RH8 on various boxes (yum updated for security reasons)

RH5.2 (!!!) as a mailserver (last reboot was Nov 5 2002, the machine is a 486DX100 but behind a couple of firewalls.  Typical 3-4 year reboot cycle it seems.)

CentOS4.2 on my big poweredges - moving to Scientific Linux 4.3 asap.

Advice?  Kubuntu for little stuff but Scientific Linux for serious stuff.

Security?  For serious stuff, grsecurity is a much more comprehensive approach than SELinux IMHO but even DAC can be quite powerful if properly applied.  Add POSIX ACLs for flexibility.

Synaptic package manager.  It's a breeze and far nicer than Windows!  Just set it to update all packages and away you go.  I agree that the Adept package manager that (K)ubuntu comes with is not too hot but downloading Synaptic will make life a lot easier.

Yum is trying to do to .rpm-based distros what Synaptic does for .deb packages but, as a recent convert, IMHO .deb is still a better packaging format.  Apart from that, the big advantage of Debian based systems is that they have many more package developers and folk than RH who submit to the Debian repositories.  So you don't spend your time updating yum.conf to include XYZ's stuff.

Linux will not threaten XP not because it is less well packaged but because MS means money and there is little benefit to manufacturers to put it on.  There is quite a big learning curve and some things are easier on XP but the security and solid craft of Linux really puts XP to shame once you know it...

In a recent survey by Nag, 53% of users were using Windows and 51% Linux.  That's at the sharp edge of scientific computing.  Office people will remain wedded to XP.

My Dell Inspiron 6000 does everything under Linux that it does under XP except much sharper.  I include playing DVDs, sleep, wireless.  Kubuntu 6.06 out of the box (or down the wire as it happens) apart from loading libdvdcss!

I would have to say Suse Linux Enterprise Server (SLES 10) as this is what we use at work and its so smooth to administrate! desktop wise im a Mac fan so Darwin!

Couldn't get Ubuntu to work with my machine. The Livecd wouldn't boot but I persisted with a lesser known distro PcLinuxOs. Installed easily and comes highly recommended from this newbie to the Linux world.

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Regards,

Tony

The current test release of PCLinuxOS 2007 (not yet finally released) is the smoothest, most competent distro ever (all in my opinion of course).

Eric

 

I used SuSE linux on my machines for 9 years, but I don't like their tie up with MS, so now on my two main machines I run Kubuntu & FreeBSD 6.1.  On my test machine, I've installed PCLinuxOS 0.93 "Big Daddy" to tinker about with (it kinda reminds me how SuSE used to be a few years ago), as well as CentOS 4.4, & FC 6 to try out..

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Windows free for 11 years! :)
Mandriva 2008.1 64-bit
Mandriva One 2008.1 32-bit
FreeBSD 7.0

I've been an Ubuntu user for about 6 months now.  Very happy.  Currently using 6.10 and will take the plunge and upgrade to 7.04 next month

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ZyXel Prestige 660HW
Zen 8000 Lite

Personally, Kubuntu 6.10 on 2 laptops and 2 desktops. :)  Finally got rid of my last windows machine 3 days ago (taking the wife kicking and screaming with the format). After initial protests, she is much preferring Ubuntu, and so am I from a network security point of view.

 /me does the Microsoft Free dance.
 

I gave the beta a spin the other day of Feisty and it does look good. Gnome 2.18 is very polished shame it still doesn't like my wlan card though.  I will be doing a reformat for it when April 19th comes around and going LVM on a new bigger disk

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David Nelson
Team Leader
Business Support Unit
Zen Internet

I'm running Ubuntu Feisty on my home desktop and Ubuntu Edgy on my home laptop .... I have XP on a partition but rarely dip in to it these days.

David - have you tried Ndiswrapper for your wireless card? I remember I had some problems getting this set up in Edgy and needed to disable the default wireless card configuration in the OS before I could get Ndiswrapper to work.

If it's any help - I can see if I can find the relevant article in the Ubuntu Forums.