Linux distributions - Where to download, where to buy.
One of the best places to download:
http://www.linuxiso.org Also: http://www.distrowatch.com If you want to buy, instead of download: http://www.cheapbytes.com -kwag |
In adition I want to add some notes:
If yust starting with linux, the first thing is to ask yourself: WHY? Do you yust want something else to play with, start with knoppix or another distro wich can be run from cd. http://www.knoppix.net/ Do you want an easy to install distro wich has the best hardware support and a real lot of languiges onboard you need Mandrake. http://www.linux-mandrake.com/ Do you want to use linux in a professional enviroment, like as office file/web/mail server, use RedHat or Suze. http://www.redhat.com/ http://www.suse.com/ Are you more experienced and fully against commercial software and fully GPL minded, use Debian. http://www.debian.org/ If you want a lot of control over your system and like to get back to basic, use slackware. http://www.slackware.com/ And finaly, if you still get bord with all of them and want FULL control, you can build your own linux from scratch, the only thing you need is a working linux system with development tools, a clear mind and a lot off time. http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ Don't expect everything to work as in windows, linux is really a lot simpler, I really mean that. Once you get familiar with the system there will be a new world... (it only takes some time, a good schrink and two devorces ;) |
other flavours
what about the other distros i keep seeing,,
like Lindows or winlinux, licoris,,etc,,, are these da same as the more prominent ones, or just a marketing ploy from K-Mart ? :) ztr |
Off-course there are lot's of others, only if you don't want to get lost in a web off package dependencies (missing or misnamed dll's or executables) it's advisable to use the more "well known" distro's since most off the pre-compiled (read instalable executables/binairys) packages are for them.
If you don't get scared for some compiling, it doesn't really mather. Further if you want to use linux professionaly, it's nice to know your distro complys to all standards and is supported by the "big boys". Apart from that, distros like redhat are around for years and cost nothing if downloaded. There are a lot of users around, so that also count's for some help of other users if you get stuck. If you use something like lindows (wich is like cursing in the churce) you have to pay money for something that isn't worth it. And within years you have to face the fact that the company is broke and there (expensive) support is gone... Linux is free, (as in free your mind and free of charge) so if someone desides to take something free and ask money for it and there are people out there who are actualy buying it... On the other hand, if nobody ever bought a redhat or suze distro they wouldn't excist today... As for licoris and winlinux, these distro's are made to make the step from windblows to linux easyer, for the rest it's yust a mather of tast. |
Lindows and Licoris are probable the easiest and more "Desktop" friendly distros.
But I recently installed Knoppix, and I really like it. Probably because it's "Debian" based, which is the closest thing to FreeBSD (on the packages collection), which is still my OS of choice for my customers. As I once said: To play, use Linux. To work, use *BSD. But thats my opinion. -kwag |
And if you really are a linux geek... I recommend gentoo linux (http://www.gentoo.org)
Compile everything yourself = top performance + newest software btw... I couldn't even install it :-( damn pppoe connection probs |
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-kwag |
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I love to play... I hate to work... (luckely my boss doesn't read forums ;) Have you read history of open-source? maybe it shanges your vision of bsd. |
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GNU License = "Give your sources and modifications away" You must :!: BSD License = "Change anything you want, and you get to keep it, and use it comercially" That makes a BIG difference, to us as a company, and to our customers. Not to mention this, which I still have to see a single Linux box take this bang. Look at the uptime: http://www.digitalfaq.com/archives/i.../2003/09/1.png http://www.digitalfaq.com/archives/i.../2003/09/2.png :mrgreen: -kwag |
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And an uptime off over an year (with whatever load) isn't that odd... it only proves you have a great power supplyer ;) Sorry, but I do agree that bsd is on a higher level than linux, only linux has a lot more speed in apps. and driver development. bsd always seems to "hop" a few months behind. |
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But I had some disasters with Linux back around 1999, since Debian with kernel 2.0.16. I had six servers running, 3 FreeBSD and 3 Debian. Everything was fine, until a power failure on one of my customer gave up, and the power plant didn't kick in. This was a system running 330 live operators :!: When the power came back up, the 3 BSD machines fsck'ed (file system check, for the ones who don't know the meaning ;) ), and came up immediately. One of the Debian machines did the same, and came up. The other two, one messed up the CMOS, and had to be manually cleared and restarted, and the other Debian box, being EXT2FS, crashed the whole file system, and had to be completely reformatted. Not even doing a fsck on the backup superblocks fixed the problem. The next day, you can guess, all six machines were running FreeBSD, and no more nightmares for me :!: True story :) -kwag |
well, i think its time to get back to linAx,,,
i havent played around wit it since 99. i had managed to install eight OS's onto one of our old x86 servers. dos 6.22, w95b, w95c, w98, nt4, nt5 beta, mandrake, Be 4.x, but i could never set up freeBSD. After three days i , threw in the towel. so respect to ya kwag, cuz ya play wit it. FBSD is probably the only OS to date which has stomped me. i recently i downed some recent distros,,, tried licoris too, but it looked too much like XP,,,and i wanted it to look more like linux not xp,,,im running xp already. i've always liked mandrake. even the latest version. tried redhat 8,not too crazy about it. i heard that mandrake is based on red hat so one could still use their rpm's for updates and the like.Yes No ??? i would assume that the latest builds support usb2, firewire, some flash drives and the like. i'm working on a W2K3 server for a client, once im finished that ill set up linux as probably my main firewall and masquerade from there. so ill be buggin ya guys for some help here n there,,, thanx Zooter |
Hi zooter,
The big problem I see with Red Hat ( and Mandrake and other "Red Hat" based distros ) is the packaging system. The RPMs. The dependency system sucks :!: For example, if you download an RPM package, and that package depends on some other package, you need to download that "dependant" package, before you install your wanted package. So now you download that "dependency" package, and that one also "depends" on some other package, and you wind up manually downloading a string of packages, until you are able to finally install the single one you wanted 8O This doesn't exist on FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD or Debian ( and Debian based ) systems. All dependencies are automatically taken care of, and the packaging system is designed to pull of the net the "pre-compiled" dependency packages, and install them. On the *BSDs, it goes another step further. You can do a "make && make install" on your wanted ports collection (called packages on NetBSD), and it will compile your target, by first compiling ALL dependant sources, and finally compiling the final software. This concept is un-existant in the Linux world :!: And believe me. once you get used to it, you sorely miss it in all Linux distributuions. The closest thing is Debian, but it works with pre-compiled packages. Not sources. The other thing is that in Linux, you can't create a "World". That means, you can't type: "make world" as you can do in FreeBSD, and the COMPLETE operating system binaries are built and installed from the source tree. On Linux, you have to pull off all sources, compile them separately, and cross your fingers when you put it all together. The kernel, which is what is really Linux, is made by Linus Torvalds and company. The binaries, are made by the free software foundation, plus thousands of addons of thousands of people around the world. GCC, GLIBC, etc, etc. I call Linux a "Frankenstein" of OS's, because it's put together just like that :lol: The funny thing is , that it works :!: But if you look at the source code quality in the BSD source tree and the Linux source tree, there's where you'll see why companies like Apple decided to choose FreeBSD as one of the core components of OS X. Plus the BSD license let's Apple do whatever they want with the code, and keep their changes as leverage over their competition. So I see Linux ( and other GNU based works ) play a great role in companies, but will not reach a commercial level as BSDs have. For example, CISCO uses lots of BSD code in their products. Sun Microsystems Solaris, is based on BSD. There are thousands of embedded products that use NetBSD as the core OS, and nobody knows that :!: But then again, you see companies that use Linux, and they don't care about the GNU license, like Lindows for example. You have to subscribe to get their CD, because you can't download it without paying. This is clearly a violation of the GNU license, because they have modified components and they MUST make them available because they are selling a product to the public. Try to get the sources from them :cool: Suse. Same thing. Now you have to buy their distribution, because you can only download a demo :!: But then, who's going to sue them :?: Anyway, if I have to use a Linux distribution, I choose Debian ( or Debian based ) because of the way it's put together. Linux has much more "momentum" in the industry than BSDs, and BSDs are all around us, in appliances, even if we are not aware of them. :) -kwag |
{oh, okay,,
yeah,,,that's what i meant...} "And the Award goes to : " :lol: :lol: :lol: zooTer |
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-kwag |
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for some reason out of the 5 or 6 distro's i tried , i like mandrake, the best. not sure why, just felt comfortable with it from the get go. But now, u got me wondering if im missing something by not going *bsd or even with debian... ztr.. |
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FreeBSD, with the default X11/KDE installation, is very good, but far from all Linux distributions. BUT after you read a little on customizing KDE, you can have the same look and feel on Linux and on FreeBSD. But it will take you a while to do that. However, when you compare both OSs side by side on the same machine, you'll notice that FreeBSD is more responsive (under heavy loads) than Linux. One benchmark I always do, is that I open 6 xterm windows on the desktop. Then I type: "find /" on each. Then, I run "iozone" and "iostone" benchmarks on two more xterm windows, and last, I start Openoffice (StarOffice) timed with a chronometer. It never fails, to see staroffice full desktop up, before any Linux distribution, doing the same benchmark ;) But again, these are heavy "stress" tests that I do for fun, and to load the system to the max. For casual (regular) desktop use, Linux is just fine, and I use it too :!: But if you plan on setting up a heavy DNS, Mail, SQL, etc., server, you'll really see the difference when running on FreeBSD. Are you aware that almost every machine at yahoo.com used FreeBSD :?: Also, did you know that many of the effects of the movie "The Matrix", were done with FreeBSD (wonder why? :lol: ) :?: http://www.freebsd.org/news/press-rel-1.html And again, Linux was used for most of the water rendering effects on the "Titanic" movie: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=2494 So you can't go wrong with either :mrgreen: -kwag |
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So in those days mandrake was redhat with kde added, nowadays Mandrake is completely homebrew in France. One consequence of this is that it's like (I'am car-mechanic) trying to maintain a french car. As long as you only drive it, it's great! only when you go digging under the hood, you will get lost in dozens of tiny things wich are all connected and if one fails... |
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On my server I use a 2.4.20-wolk kernel with rmap, preempt and a lot of other improvements from 2.5.x, and with reiserfs as filesystem it cant go wrong 8) I ran some tests, unplugged the powercord a couple off times during heavy load, without data loss or other problems... Quote:
On the other side; building mozilla from source or yust installing the binairys saves the end user a lot off time ;) But don't understand me wrong, I think it's a great system, but the end user only wants a running system. Quote:
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Don't understand me wrong, bsd is a lot more stable than linux and more professional too, with all of my replies I only want to make clear that there are more points of view than only the ones of a company and it's custumers. There are companies who like to work behind closed doors to provide a sertain kind off privicy to there customers, based on whatever kind off license that provides that kind off privicy... (and that's not the GPL) but there are also a real lot of developers who create great code for private use but like to share that with the rest of the world and the GPL provides them with the security that nobody can (openly) use there code without contributing back, but that doesn't mean that GPL products can't be used commercialy. There's no rule saying U have to put the source world-wide, but if they want, U have to provide it to your costumers. Conclusion: We want alpha server with bsd and a dual G5 with linux as workstation to play with. |
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ReiserFS is excelent, but I'm not sure it will ever reach the performance of XFS. It wasn't designed the same way, and it's still fairly new, compared to XFS. Quote:
With EXT2, you already know the results :lol: Quote:
You see, the problem with Linux on this one, is that if an operating system binary is buggy, you have to get a patch from the individual developers/maintainers, and apply it to your system. And that's where problems start :!: There is a loose (VERY loose) coupling between all OS binaries in Linux, because there's no one center source tree (except for the kernel). So this developer who just compiled, say a kernel driver, assumes all API on all other binaries is the same. Because Linux is in a state of flux all the time, most probably when you update your system with this binary, you break something else :!: This is the main complaint in the industry about linux, and this will probably never be corrected, because of the "non-centralized" development nature of Linux. On the other hand, on the *BSDs, you have complete source branches, a stable branch, a snapshot branch, and an engineering release branch (FreeBSD), which only applies fixes to the stable branch. Again, this doesn't exist in the Linux world. You only have a "stable" kernel branch ( xx, even, xx ) and a development branch ( xx ,ODD, xx ) version numbered on Linux. That's it. Quote:
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FreeBSD ( and other BSDs ) use their own BASH, etc. utilities. It's not the same as the one in the free software foundation (GNU). Just look at the sources on the BSD tree, and try to find a "GNU License". You won't. It's all "Copyright, regents of the university of California:, etc. ;) Quote:
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It's clearly stated on the license, unless your modifications are for internal company use. If you modify anything, then you must release "the modified sources" to the world. But then again, there's a BIG hole in GNU license, where you can actually use GNU sources and you don't have to give out the source :!: It's simple. You modify a GNU source, and you make "hooks" in the sources to call "your" propietary sources. Now what happens: Your application compiles, and you distribute it. You give out the modified sources but you don't have you give out "your" sources (that's clearly specified in the license). Now the sources are crippled, because nobody can compile them :!: You did give out the modified GNU sources, so you are complying with the license. So there's more than one way to skin a cat ;) Quote:
No wonder the US Navy bought a bunch of Apple servers, and is installing YellowDog on them :cool: http://www.terrasoftsolutions.com/news/2003-08-06.shtml -kwag |
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