The Saga Continues

WuTang! WuTang!
My last post involved some fun and games with Linux distributions. Well, it continues.

I had Ubuntu (Gutsy) on my junk laptop. As I said before, I'm not digging Ubuntu. This machine is primarily an interweb browser. It's an old Compaq I got from a friend. The laptop itself works pretty well except for the extremely loud fans. I've tried mucking with the settings to quiet the thing down, but it really gets that hot as I found out during an install of Debian Etch.

The fam and I went to the bookstore, and I picked up one of those magazines that's basically just a distro with some poorly written text. This one was pink and it had the most recent Debian release with all three DVDs. I probably could have downloaded and burned them, but there's a point at which you have to say: "what is my time worth?" Besides that, it's nice to give some money to someone that's not Microsoft every now and then. I figured I could learn something from the text too, but that didn't really happen.

The installation is way more dumbed down than the last time I remember installing Debian. There isn't much in the way of package selection at the installation stage anymore. I figured I'd give encrypted partitions a shot too. The format was taking forever for the encryption. The fans started spinning louder and louder.
And louder...

It died. The machine just shut down. I restarted after a couple of hours and tried again. This time I left the encryption out. It installed, I ran it, and it was good.
Fedora 9 on the other laptop was starting to frustrate me. I wanted to add some new repos, but the Software Configuration utility has no add feature. That's kinda weird. Why would they do that? I probably could have edited a sources file or something. There were other things bothering me that escape me now. I do like Fedora though. Probably because I started my Linux life on RedHat and have most of my experience with it. Debian would be the number two on that list.

I liked Debian so much on the junk machine, I decided to wipe the Fedora and go for it. I haven't reformatted that machine in a while, and I decided to give the floating partitions thing a whirl. I can't remember what that's called, but the partitions resize as needed. No need for gparted or whatever. That's nice. I did the install, and then got into the struggle with Broadcom for my wireless. This is a problem that is ongoing. The connection is fine, but there's a bug that's reporting an assert issue at startup. It's up and on the interwebs, and it's good.

I have been doing some work on a forum that I started (Dirt Treaders). I wanted to run it on my laptop, so I installed using the "web server" package selection when setting up the Debian install. That was a bad idea. Apache got installed, but I wanted Apache2. Then I installed 2, but it wasn't running even though the services thing said it was. If it was, it wasn't at port 80 on loclahost. I eventually had to uninstall both and re-install 2. Then I couldn't get apachectl running. Turns out there's a apache2ctl that you use. :) Who'd have expected that!!!

It's all up and I have phpBB3 going with a copy of the site. I'm loving Debian. It's always harder to do anything, but I kinda like that. If I start talking about trying Slackware though, someone please stop me!

Linux

So I've tried a few distros recently. I have two active laptops: one older Compaq Presario, and a 3 year old HP Pavillion. The Compaq had Debian on it. I believe it was Etch. Really, it didn't have any issues, and I probably should have left well enough alone. But fiddle I must, and fiddle I did. This machine has pretty limited resources -- which is why I had Deb on there to begin with -- so I went with a Ubuntu Gutsy disc I had lying around from a Linux Format mag.

I've tried Gutsy before. It was my first and only Ubuntu experience. I didn't really go for it the last time because I new it to be the "user-friendly" (i.e. non-nerdy) version, and was turned off by the concept. This time I'm giving it the real go. And, I hate it. From the beginning. The install pissed me off because it didn't give me many (read: any really) options. Just click on the install thing. That may be great for some people, but I'd rather select the stuff I know I want from the get-go. I hate having to go in later and find the stuff I really wanted.

There's something else weird going on here. I thought this was a Gnome install. Why are almost all of the apps KDE then? Where's Epiphany for example? Interesting that Gnome is the preferred window manager, but a large percentage of the apps are KDE.

Next thing that bugs is the start-up. No news is good news I guess. I can't tell what's going on. I'm just staring at a blank screen waiting for the thing to come up. My personal preference is to watch the startup process from start to finish to see what it's doing. If you want to be Windows-ish and hide all of that from the user, well, be my guest. But, count me out as a user.

The only thing positive I have to say is the wireless worked without any monkeying around with ndiswrapper or fwcutter or anything. Needless to say, I won't be trying Heron on this machine. As soon as I find the time, it's back to Debian it goes.

On my HP machine, I wanted to give the new openSuse (11) a go. I've been going the cheap route and not burning discs. I have a partition set aside just to avoid it. I've so far managed to find what I need to either boot from ISOs or from copying the files to a partition. This time I failed. So I burned a disc.

The install was nice. Quite lovely and not a hitch through the whole process. I've had issues in the past with changing the default config, but no probs this time. It went very well. But then I started the OS. It bombed on me. It was very buggy. I had issues getting my Broadcom working. Ok, so I've always had issues with my Broadcom, but this was a pain in the ass. Once I got it going, I downloaded Fedora 9 to my install partition, and dumped openSuse like a bad habit.

I did get it working, but after like an hour fiddling with it to get rid of the slab menu and to make it more Fedora-like, I thought to myself: "why make this like what I prefer?" I figured it was better to go with what I prefer. I started out on RedHat, and I've always been a fan.

I had tried the 64bit version of FC9 before and it didn't work out well. The install was bombing on me. I've come to realize that I'm just not meant for 64bit yet. The 32bit version is working quite well and I'm very comfortable with it. No slab. No attempt to hide away the startup process. It doesn't try to be like Windoze. It's just good software, and I like it.