Which Linux to try next?

[xtknight]

Yeah, I may attempt Gentoo Stage 2 again. That's tomorrow afternoon's project. Then I think I'll just try some KDE themes rather than expecting it all to be prepackaged for me. I'm interested how Debian is. My brother seems to love it. Is the package manager better than RPM, or is that just subjective? Is there a glaring benefit? I hate dealing with RPM incompatibilities, but I suppose it's not RPM's fault. It's just that I use --nodeps too much and screw everything up. Some things just don't install. They say they're missing something but the thing is there, the exact version of it.

Right now I'm actually pretty happy with Mandriva 2006 (I installed that since OP). It's everything I want it to be, almost. The damn thing runs Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory with video and sound right out of the box (+a NVIDIA driver). That's amazing IMO. Never before has it been that easy.

It's time for a "penta-boot" system I guess. No problem with that with 500 GB. I need help resizing a ReiserFS partition though. It's being stubborn.

Thanks for the responses...I get so many more here than I do at linuxquestions.org it seems.

 

[Nothinman]

I'm interested how Debian is. My brother seems to love it. Is the package manager better than RPM, or is that just subjective? Is there a glaring benefit?

The benefits are a result of the strict packaging guidelines that the Debian developers follow, not the package manager itself. Especially since with RH/FC you have to add some 3rd party repos to get access to half of the useful packages out there and RH/FC have no control over the people putting packages in those repos. With Debian 99% of the software I need is in the main repo and the other 1% is in an outside repo that's maintained by a Debian developer.

I hate dealing with RPM incompatibilities, but I suppose it's not RPM's fault. It's just that I use --nodeps too much and screw everything up. Some things just don't install. They say they're missing something but the thing is there, the exact version of it.

You should never use --nodeps, hell in this day and age you should never have to run the rpm command directly.

 

[xtknight]

OK I decided to download Debian. I'm downloading AMD64 Unofficial Sarge release (there's no official AMD64 I guess ). It seems to have two DVDs. One of these is bootable, right? I can't seem to find that out or not. There's another directory on http://amd64.debian.net called debian-installer. What do I want here if I want a bootable Debian installer DVD that works for AMD64?

Or maybe I should just get the i386 version? I don't really have any 64-bit apps anyway and maybe it's not worth the possible problems, slower mirrors, and lack of documentation with the unofficial version. I have an Athlon 64 CPU so I can run x86 and x86-64. If I do use the i386 version, seeing as it's a "lowest common denominator", is there an easy way to turn on MMX, 3DNow, SSE, and SSE2 extensions so it automatically knows I have a supporting processor when I do ./configure for stuff?

Thanks for the help.

 

[Nothinman]

The AMD64 port didn't make it in time for sarge and I believe the only thing keeping it out of etch/sid right now is mirror size. Because Debian supports around a dozen architectures a full mirror is amazingly large. As the README.txt says, the debian-installer directory contains daily snapshots of the installer from it's development tree. I don't know what kinds of bugs they're having problems with, but you probably don't want to use those unless you plan on helping them fix things =)

Personally, I would just grab the i386 version for now. If you plan on using closed source, 32-bit things like flash, w32codecs, etc you'll have a lot less work to do to get them working. The kernel makes virtually no use of MMX, 3DNow, SSE(2), infact there's only like 15 places where the kernel uses the FPU at all, so running a 386 kernel on a newer CPU won't lose you much. And userland apps are allowed to use whatever assembly they want, so even if you're using a 386 kernel with no support for 3DNow that doesn't stop userland tools from using it. But you should avoid compiling from source as much as possible, there's really no reason to be compiling things yourself in this day and age unless you're a developer or have some very odd requirements.

 

[xtknight]

OK. DVD2 of i386 is en route via ftp now.

Yeah. Well when gcc is called from configure doesn't it take its default flags something? If I just add something to a file like -ffast_math or whatever, I think it'd be worth it even for a 0.1% increase. But I'm not gonna recompile my kernel just for that.

What's the command in Debian for downloading/installing packages? apt-get? yum? yast?

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: xtknight
OK. DVD2 of i386 is en route via ftp now.

Yeah. Well when gcc is called from configure doesn't it take its default flags something? If I just add something to a file like -ffast_math or whatever, I think it'd be worth it even for a 0.1% increase. But I'm not gonna recompile my kernel just for that.

Typically 0.1% isn't worth it. configure should look to see what gcc settings you configured. So setup your environment right and you shouldn't have any problems. Unless you trigger one of those fun bugs in icky optimization code... :evil:

What's the command in Debian for downloading/installing packages? apt-get? yum? yast?

apt is the tool. There is documentation on it at debian.org. Check out the site, it's kind of helpful.

EDIT: Link

 

[RMorris78]

If you used SuSE and Mandriva, you will probably like kubuntu more than ubuntu because of the KDE compared to the GNOME, unless you wanna try GNOME.

Personally, i like KDE ALOT more than GNOME

 

[Nothinman]

OK. DVD2 of i386 is en route via ftp now.

You should have just grabbed the small netinst image and installed directly from the FTP site.

Yeah. Well when gcc is called from configure doesn't it take its default flags something? If I just add something to a file like -ffast_math or whatever, I think it'd be worth it even for a 0.1% increase. But I'm not gonna recompile my kernel just for that.

It takes flags from whatever the author gave as the defaults, the USE flags crap you're probably thinking of is Gentoo only AFAIK. And again, you should be compiling software by hand pretty much never.

What's the command in Debian for downloading/installing packages? apt-get? yum? yast?

APT is the midlevel tool but you should get acquainted with aptitude since it'll do nice things like track which packages were installed automatically as dependencies and remove them when nothing else depends on them again.

 

[xtknight]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
You should have just grabbed the small netinst image and installed directly from the FTP site.

I did that with SUSE and regretted it because I couldn't as easily reinstall. Plus it wastes bandwidth if my stupidity messes up my current installation. It has to download everything over again. Meh... Plus if I just screw up one little thing at the end like choosing the wrong bootloader, or if there's an incompatibility, I can just start the install over again without having to wait 8 hours for the whole thing to download again.

It's all done by now and I'm burning it so I'll post my results later this evening.

 

[xtknight]

Hmm...bad news. Debian couldn't install base system. Some dependency problem and couldn't load initrd. /dev/hdk bad block volume or something. It failed on kernel-image-2.4 and kernel something else 2.4. Argh. I did also have to disable APIC in my BIOS so that the SATA drive worked. Well isn't there a Debian that uses kernel 2.6? I bet kernel 2.4 is just too old for nForce4 (PCIe, SATA, et al.) All my hardware is supported fully by 2.6 so I'd prefer 2.6. I guess I'll go for a net install at least for the base part. Is there a 2.6 kernel base system I can use for Debian? Other than that it looked like it was going to be pretty sweet. Partitioning was easy. But I just need to get one that has kernel 2.6 I suppose. They don't make it easy for us nForcers.

Edit: turns out I got 3.1 r0 instead of r1. I guess that mirror didn't have the latest version. Well that sucks. But I'm going to try network install now with a mini-CD.

 

[SleepWalkerX]

Weird. Did you check with the md5?

And yeah you could try debian etch (testing) or sid (unstable), they have the 2.6 kernel.

http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=debian

Btw, what was wrong with Suse? How come you didn't stick with it? I'm lovin my 10.0 right now.

 

[xtknight]

I still have SUSE. I just like experimenting with things.

It appears the mini-CD with the new version didn't work either...mkinitrd failed: /dev/hdk4 is not a block device.

 

[najames]

I am a distro whore and have tried many of them. I would install the i386 version of Ubuntu Breezy 5.10, even if you have a 64bit CPU, A one CD download. If you want to dual boot it with WinXP or something, install XP first then install Ubuntu. After Ubuntu is installed, go look for Automatix by Arnieboy in the Ubuntu forums. Follow his instructions and install Automatix. You will now have a kick butt Linux desktop system with full multimedia running and more. Use this as a learning platform, and learn to use the Syanptic app for any other software you want, but Automatix is very complete. This Ubuntu setup is running next to me on another AMD64 PC. I am typing the on a Suse 10 64bit box. I worked hard to get half as much working as Automatix does and now the sound is hosed on the Suse box. Look for howto Ubuntu info if you get stuck and the Ubuntu forums are fantastic.

Learn some baisc Linux/Unix commands. This system will teach you a lot in the Linux/Unix world but let you get going easily without frustrating yourself.

Now you will be ready to try other Linux/Unix.

 

[Nothinman]

Well isn't there a Debian that uses kernel 2.6?

Yep and it's on the CD you downloaded. I don't remember exactly since I haven't done an install in years, but I think the image is named linux26.

Edit: turns out I got 3.1 r0 instead of r1. I guess that mirror didn't have the latest version. Well that sucks. But I'm going to try network install now with a mini-CD.

That's minor, the r* releases are mainly just security updates which you can get via apt after you're setup.

 

[xtknight]

Originally posted by: najames
I am a distro whore and have tried many of them. I would install the i386 version of Ubuntu Breezy 5.10, even if you have a 64bit CPU, A one CD download. If you want to dual boot it with WinXP or something, install XP first then install Ubuntu. After Ubuntu is installed, go look for Automatix by Arnieboy in the Ubuntu forums. Follow his instructions and install Automatix. You will now have a kick butt Linux desktop system with full multimedia running and more. Use this as a learning platform, and learn to use the Syanptic app for any other software you want, but Automatix is very complete. This Ubuntu setup is running next to me on another AMD64 PC. I am typing the on a Suse 10 64bit box. I worked hard to get half as much working as Automatix does and now the sound is hosed on the Suse box. Look for howto Ubuntu info if you get stuck and the Ubuntu forums are fantastic.

Learn some baisc Linux/Unix commands. This system will teach you a lot in the Linux/Unix world but let you get going easily without frustrating yourself.

Now you will be ready to try other Linux/Unix.

Thanks for the suggestion. I may end up trying Ubuntu. I can generally find my way around things well when it comes to Linux but I'm not nearly an expert at it. I know the basics though, and you don't have to worry about me frustrating myself here. I'm just having fun trying new things. I'm young and have a lot of free time. I have no intention of using it for productivity. Call me insane. But thanks again. Maybe I will if Ubuntu's package manager is good. That's what I'm aiming for now I guess.

Any other distros based off debian package manager? Can I use the Debian package system on another distro or would that be a disaster?

Nothinman: how do I tell it to use the Linux 2.6 kernel on boot? It gives me the boot: prompt, what should I type there? 'linux' must be symbollically linked to linux-2.4 and I don't know the command line for the linux 2.6 one.

I can't do the mini-CD because the network controller it detects is the one on my mobo which is broken (Silicon Image one). (Why is it broken? I don't know, but it is. Also broken in Windows and in the BIOS it says FAIL for the link tester too..... )

Here's the directory tree of the 'install' dir of the first full DVD. What would I type to boot it? Something like:

boot: ./2.6/vmlinuz

?

---As a side note, I wonder how Gentoo's emerge/portage compares with Debian's apt-get but I suppose I should pick something and stick with it. I just wish Debian install worked.

 

[Nothinman]

Nothinman: how do I tell it to use the Linux 2.6 kernel on boot? It gives me the boot: prompt, what should I type there? 'linux' must be symbollically linked to linux-2.4 and I don't know the command line for the linux 2.6 one.

As I said, I think it's 'linux26' but I don't remember for sure.

 

[xtknight]

Yup, linux26 did it. Cool.

OK, now I've got another problem. It seems the newer mini-CD I booted with (3.1 I think) won't read my 3.0r1 DVD for packages (version mismatch?) I can mount my DVD drive just fine and see the files but the aptitude thing just doesn't want to 'accept' it, even after I unmount it again. The DVDRW is /dev/hdd so I put that in where it says specify CD device, and it just does nothing. I press enter and it flickers once, no errors or anything. Actually when I didn't manually specify, it said bad media (paraphrased), but I don't know where it was looking. But anyway, I got the base system installed, and it even detected my two other Linuxes (SUSE and Mandriva), their names, plus Windows, and put them in a bootloader. Pretty damn sweet there.

Disabling the controller on which my CDRW drive is on in the BIOS, does not do anything. Linux still detects it anyway so it only wants to use that drive instead of my DVDRW I guess. That's one problem I have. It doesn't seem too versatile and wants to assume to always use the first device it finds of its class. I have lots of 'duplicate' devices. However this time it actually asked me which ethernet controller to use. I don't know how but I also got it to a specify CD drive screen so I'm getting lucky with the new kernel.

Somehow my broken ethernet controller works again (linux fixed it or wtf?) so I was lucky I got the mini-CD to do anything. Anyhow so I can login, and everything, it looks neat. Now's the hard part. Installing X. X is a necessity to me. It appears apt-setup will let me specify from where to install packages over the net so I'll see if I have any luck with that. Other than the package problem, Debian Linux kernel 2.6 is working great.

Edit: I'm gonna just try the Internet install. Report back later.

 

[xtknight]

Update:

Got Debian installed from Internet, and desktop environment. In X now.

 

[xtknight]

Hmm...I've already got some package issues. What is it trying to tell me here? (attached code)

Why are they 'not going to be installed'?

And this openmotif package needs xlib6g and I have no idea how to obtain it. apt-get install xlib6g just lists this.

 

[Nothinman]

For the motif thing, install libxaw6.

What version of Debian are you running?

 

[xtknight]

Never mind, the openmotif thing was for Opera and I googled specifically xlib6g and Opera and they say to use lesstif2 instead so I got that working and uninstalled openmotif. Now I have no problems at all. Apt-get install audacity worked.

debian:/tmp# uname -a
Linux debian 2.6.8-2-386 #1 Tue Aug 16 12:46:35 UTC 2005 i686 GNU/Linux

I think the Debian release I got was i386 Debian 3.1 r1a, that's the volume name on the mini-CD I used for network installation.

 

[xtknight]

Somehow I need to 'make' an eth1. It didn't detect my other nForce4 ethernet controller but I know the driver exists and it's even loaded in lsmod (called "forcedeth"). How do I associate it with eth1?

Hmm.. Same thing with my sound card. snd-emu10k1 and emu10k1 are loaded but the sound just doesn't want to be used. XMMS just says make sure nothing else is using the sound card, make sure sound system is started, etc.

 

[Nothinman]

snd-emu10k1 and emu10k1 are mutually exclusive, once is the ALSA driver and one is the OSS driver. If they're both loaded, you need to figure out which one loaded first to see which is driving the card.

As for the NIC, if the driver is loaded it's already got an interface designation and you just need to figure out what it is.

 

[xtknight]

OK, snd_emu10k1 was the correct one apparently. I just needed to download alsa and then do alsaconf. Then my sound is working fine. And I guess my network is eth3 instead. Can I swap eth1 and eth3? Eth1 is just some firewire ethernet thing, I'm not sure what it is to be honest but I'll never be using it. I hope you don't mind me asking all these questions.

 

[Nothinman]

Technically you can rename them to whatever you want with ifrename or 'ip link name', but you have to do it before the interface comes up. The simpler solution is just to put the modules for the devices into /etc/modules in the order you want them to load, the first will be eth0, second eth1 and so on. The only problem with that is that if you have udev/hotplug start before the module-init-tools script, it'll load them in whatever order it wants and I don't remember if that applies to Sarge or if only Etch and Sid are affected.