Jacking in Jaunty

[theheyes]

Hi there folks,

Over the past few weeks I've finally ended many years of dipping my toe into Linux by diving straight in and forcing myself to use it as my main operating system. Truth be told, it's been a mixed bag. The good news is there have been many, many more positives than negatives. The bad news is the negatives have been critical. For an OS that prides itself on stability last night was a total system freeze too far. There is a part of me that would like to get to the bottom of the problem, but a larger part that wants an easier life.

So, I'd like some recommendations for an alternative to Ubuntu Jaunty. I use my PC mainly for web browsing, listening to music, watching videos and word processing. I have an 8800GT but I'm not a gamer. However I do like the fancy desktop effects and watch HD video, so I'd like to use a decent driver.

The number 1 priority is stability, I don't want to be on the bleeding edge. In fact I've been looking at the Ubuntu LTS release. So far I've been looking at:

• Ubuntu 8.04
• Debian
• OpenSUSE
• CentOS
• Fedora 10 (soon to be 11)
• Linux Mint

Could anyone offer any insight or suggestions on where to start? I'm going to buy a new hard drive this weekend so I can multiple boot a couple and try them out properly. A live cd is great but a far cry from actually living with it.

Cheers guys, I know it's basically just another "which distro" thread but I'd like to hear what you think.

 

[theheyes]

try them all.

I probably will eventually, but with many distros out there I just wanted to narrow down the shortlist a little. 9.04 took a few days to eventually bum out after running fine so it could be a lengthy process.

with jaunty did you use ext4?

Nope, ext3. I figured it had been around long enough to be a safe bet. People on the Ubuntu forums were pointing at ext4 and dodgy network and video drivers as possible causes of freezing.

What do you mean? The nVidia driver (download from their website) works fine with any distribution you listed there - you should have no problems?

That's good to know - I just added that so I didn't get recommended a distro that shied away from proprietary drivers - still a newbie!

At the end of the day if you don't have the inclination or time to work out what went wrong, stick with Windows...

However, there is no easy life until you have gained a rough knowledge of how it works and what you need to do to make it work. This takes time or a lot of leaning on people to help you out.

I've been working with Windows and OSX for years, and now I'd like to explore Linux a little. I do like to tinker and get to the bottom of problems in Windows and OSX, but with Linux I'd like to try and get used to it and comfortable first - without it crashing most days. Once I've worked with it for a while, then I'll be more inclined to get stuck in. Most people would say you learn through fixing things, and I agree, but an all-out lock up that no one seems to be able to get to the bottom of is a bit more than I can chew at this precise moment in time.

Thanks for all your input. I'm not too bothered about release cycles so long as I get security updates. I might give Debian and 8.04 a go over the weekend if I get my new hard drive.

Cheers.

 

[theheyes]

To be honest I didn't find the codec installs too bad in Ubuntu - in most cases they were automatically suggested and ready to download which was great.

I had a similar problem with ati drivers on another PC I was trying Jaunty on with a 4850 - that was a nice introduction to using the recovery console

I think my first mistake was not considering Jaunty 'bleeding edge'. I thought it would be a safe bet regardless (Ubuntu > newbies) when perhaps I should have gone with a more mature release to start with.

I will look into Envy. I've also downloaded VirtualBox (which is really nice actually) so I can check out the other distros but the proof really is in the pudding. I've had things working fine in VMs and Live CDs that seems to break when on bare metal.

Cheers.

 

[theheyes]

Well, I'm on 8.10. I was going to go with 8.04 but I burned the wrong image to my last disc. Oh well its still got life in it.

Fingers crossed for this coming week. Been ok so far although unfortunately I've had to disable the compiz effects. With them enabled, even the medium setting, video suffered with really bad tearing which is weird. Disappointing but I can live with it.

 

[theheyes]

Well 8.10 has made it to Wednesday - I didn't really want to say anything to jinx it but so far so good. No freezes until now, suspend works (woo!) and I've even managed to fix my video tearing issue so I've got my compiz effects back. The only thing that doesn't work properly is my wireless when I resume from suspend - I have to disable and re-enable the driver before it comes back to life. Bit annoying but I can live with that.

As far as I can gather this release is supported until Apr 2010. It will be interesting when I'm finally forced to upgrade, hopefully it will be a better experience than Jaunty.

 

[theheyes]

...oh, and it added all the network printers with 1 click.. result.

This was my experience too. I was printing a test page within 1 minute. On our XP boxes it's a 10 minute driver install and then another few minutes sat in front of an auto-configuration screen that freezes the desktop. To be fair thats probably the HP driver but I was quite impressed with the way it (Fedora 10 in this case) worked out of the box.

As an occasional Office 2007 user I dont tend to have that problem with file formats as from day 1 I've always saved in XP/2003 format. Virtualbox is really good though if you can spare an XP license.

 

[theheyes]

Hmm never thought about trying a game with Wine. I just assumed it would never work with the amount of DRM they slap on things these days. Might dig out RA3 over the weekend if I get time.

8.10 has been tip top so far. Wireless on resume is still a bit flakey but it always comes back to life with a bit of fiddling. Happy chap thus far.