ZenWalk Dream Linux Ubuntu

whitecrook

whitecrook

whitecrook

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hi all

Seen the thread about arch a minute ago and thought i'd post a wee message up here..

So My winxp install got trojaned the other month and I said that when that install finally died, that would be it, move to full time linux.

Now over the years I have tried hundreds of distros, I think my first was suse 5.2 on a P100 16MB in about 97 or 98 i think.

I tried a few months ago when 7.10 came out and it went OK for a few weeks but in the end there ware to many things not quote right, so I shoved my win install back on.

My rig is a C2D e2140 @ 2.13Ghz 2x 1GB DDR2, 7800GTX, advansys PCI card. 500Gbx2 + 40Gb x1

However, April there I installed Ubuntu heron. Real nice. Very slick, just about every foible with previous ubuntus for me has been fixed. Compiz ROCKS!, and we have installed it on a few work machines and it blew the socks af a few collegaues :D (on a Dual Xeon with a quadro, i think)

Anyway I started to get major problems with my HDs, powering up and down constantly and making bad sounds and whining. Looks like a few people have these probs, never had them before, so I went looking.

(btw i want a distro that 'just works' I've done enough tinkering for now, and I have my linux backend servers for things like that, vms, etc)

Popped onto distro watch and Zenwalk 5.2 was the top thing there, brand new, downloaded and installed.

Nice installer, real easy. Quite pleased it made a home, / and swap partition and used XFS by default.

XFCE looks the business (now my favourite WM ), it's very fast, and has a nice software selection installed by default. It's based on slack (a distro I confess I have never used)

Problems came when I went to use my scanner to scan some film, advansys module is not compiled, so I went to recomplie the kernel. Made the config added the module, but when I went to compile gave me some error about something. not good.

Plus not using apt made me a bit uncomfortable, as I have used and preferred apt for the last 10 years, and netpkg was supposed to be easy but I couldnt work out how to search for a package, eventually i managed by piping it into grep, but this is very slow.

Nor could I work out how /proc was working nor could I get a simple lspci output..

So good first impressions, nice software selection, XFCE, but error when compiling kernel, no advansys module in by default, and as with all other distros I try never sets a proper 1600x1200 res on my LCD screen.


Next distro, looking up the list at the side of distrowatch was Dreamlinux - I downloaded this in order to try to verify if my SCSI card was faulty before I realised in Zenwalk that the modules hadn't been compiled.

This is a brazillian based distro, based on Debian (which is nice :)

Nice live installer, booted up and this also uses XFCE ( a real nice UNIX-style WM) and also the awn panel. This looks and acts to me like a imitation MacOSx style dock - i think rather than a dock it's just a slick launcher though.

Gimpshop is installed, I have never used this before. Gimp yes, photoshop yes, but not gimp shop. TBH i'm not sure if I like it - it kinda feels a little like the worst of both :( .. But It works well enough and hurrah! my scanner worked OOTB and even asked me if I wanted to scan slides or negs using Xsane. I know I can get vuescan which is awesome, but it's payware and not sure I'm 'pro enough' to need that when xsane seems to be ok.

Great control panel which is customised by the Dreamlinux team as well.

debian based, so everything is an apt-get away which is reassuring, and the FS layout is familiar.

Other than that not checked it out properly though, but it looks very slick, and run very fast even though it was a live CD!

Recommended for now, gonna try an install an run it for a few days or until a showstopper appears.

Other distros I was eyeing up, Linux Mint - but I went to the page and there's about 5 or 6 versions and I don't know what I need etc.

Still maybe gonna give arch a shot, but how do I manage packages, can I easily build packages from source tarballs? (debian makes this very easy)


I know it's long and if you made is this far, have a cookie.
 
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Try Elive its debian with the enlightenment wm on top. And from what you've posted you seem a debian sorta guy.
 
Arch has a package manager called pacman just like debian's apt-get. It's basically the same but faster, and whereas apt-get uses .deb packages pacman uses .pkg.tar.gz packages.

The huge difference between apt-get and pacman is that apt-get has a gui frontend (synaptic), pacman doesn't (apart from a few attempts by the arch community to make one but they're all dodgy). The reasoning behind this is that the CLI is quicker for package management, and in which case a gui is an unncessary complication.

If you're going to try arch I'd definitely try it on a spare computer you have lying around. It's not hard to setup but if you screw it up at least you haven't screwed up your main computer.
 
Rhys said:
Linux Mint 5 - Main Edition. Its worth a look.
Click to expand...

Mint is ubuntu with a few things installed with in turn is based on debian. Bascially what im saying here is that once you try say Debian pretty much every other distro is the same, they might come with a few different packages and a different wallpaper but they are they same.
 
whitecrook said:
Still maybe gonna give arch a shot, but how do I manage packages, can I easily build packages from source tarballs? (debian makes this very easy)
Click to expand...

there's 2 ways to install packages in Arch (3 if you include the AUR but that's just user contributed ABS)

1) PACMAN which is the binary package management system (very easy to use and handles dependencies better than any other sysyem ive used)
2) ABS which is a ports-like (freebsd) system in which you build from source

as thomas above has said there's no real GUI for pacman which is fine for me because i'm faster on the CLI anyway and to be honest it feels more linux to me when everything isn't done through GUI.

if you have half decent linux knowledge it's pretty hard to fail at Arch and once you have you're system built up from the ground running like a madman you'll be another convert ;)
 
Yeah, I'm gonna give arch a shot. I have no issue with the command line, and in fact, I prefer apt-cache search / apt-get install etc to using synaptic. (what 's the real differences between aptitude and apt-get ? - i have heard aptitude solves dependency issues better, but this is never a problem for me...)

Linux mint - yeah I don't think it's for me. I realise it's for people who want an ubuntu install fully working OOTB, but that really isn't enough of a sell point for me. Plus I'm beginning to think that Ubuntu really is just quite slow. <- or is that just me? it just 'feels' laggy/ slow etc. GFX and things are snappy and quick, but just loading up the contents of windows and things....

Any way - I'll report back wit my mini review of Arch, plus haven't tried more Dreamlinux yet, (too busy ::)
 
whitecrook said:
Plus I'm beginning to think that Ubuntu really is just quite slow. <- or is that just me? it just 'feels' laggy/ slow etc. GFX and things are snappy and quick, but just loading up the contents of windows and things....

Any way - I'll report back wit my mini review of Arch, plus haven't tried more Dreamlinux yet, (too busy ::)
Click to expand...

once you create a full GUI working distro of Arch you will really notice the difference in speed especially with compiz and compiz apps like AWN, not only in speed mind i also find them more stable on the whole.

if you don't like Arch there's also Gentoo which has a similar build from the ground up approach or Linux From Scratch if you're a true mentalist :p
 
I'm giving gentoo a go on a system tomorrow, should be interesting as its going onto a an ancient pentium 2 400mhz based system :)
 
arch looks real interesting, been looking for something else to try apart from ubuntu. have been finding i hadn't really been learning anything new from it recently, looks like arch might be quite challenging
 
whitecrook said:
Yeah, I'm gonna give arch a shot. I have no issue with the command line, and in fact, I prefer apt-cache search / apt-get install etc to using synaptic. (what 's the real differences between aptitude and apt-get ? - i have heard aptitude solves dependency issues better, but this is never a problem for me...)

Linux mint - yeah I don't think it's for me. I realise it's for people who want an ubuntu install fully working OOTB, but that really isn't enough of a sell point for me. Plus I'm beginning to think that Ubuntu really is just quite slow. <- or is that just me? it just 'feels' laggy/ slow etc. GFX and things are snappy and quick, but just loading up the contents of windows and things....

Any way - I'll report back wit my mini review of Arch, plus haven't tried more Dreamlinux yet, (too busy ::)
Click to expand...

I dont have anywhere near as much experience with linux as you, I followed a guide and got arch running, the speed comapred to ubuntu is amazing.

I even noticed a huge difference even on my Q6600, 4gb ram, 8800GT.

Arch is the way to go.
 
ah gentoo worked so well on my old p2 400 :) just did it with xfce4 and i only knew i was on the old pc when i tryed out some 3d stuff (to my missfortune). in the 2d world it was brilliant!
 
Been at this now for since 10am, for some reason I had problems something had failed. Anyway it turned out to be one of the sticks of ram in this old beast :D
 
Am thinking about Linux and having checked Distrowatch am still blown away by choice. I'd like a Linux system that's good for digital art and video editing - Dreamlinux has been recommended.

Is Linux able to support all hardware such as ATI graphics cards, wireless dongles, digital cameras etc?

Have also heard that it's no use for games - not that I play much, Aliens v Predator only to be exact :D
 
ATI graphics cards it depends, the latest drivers aren't too bad but if you have a Radeon 9200 or similar you get full 3D out of the box usually.

Wireless dongles wise all the ones I have used so far have been fine OOTB but some are pesky

Check out www.winehq.org for games compatibility.
 
almichev said:
Am thinking about Linux and having checked Distrowatch am still blown away by choice. I'd like a Linux system that's good for digital art and video editing - Dreamlinux has been recommended.

Is Linux able to support all hardware such as ATI graphics cards, wireless dongles, digital cameras etc?

Have also heard that it's no use for games - not that I play much, Aliens v Predator only to be exact :D
Click to expand...
I can't comment on Dream Linux as I've never used that distro.

However, in a more generic sense, yes there is some support for ATI graphics cards under Linux. Things have improved over the years and there are now drivers available. It's not as good as it should be, but that's ATI's fault and has nothing to do with Linux. Because of ATI's lack of desire to produce drivers (or make the details publicly available so that the open source community could provide their own) I've switched from using them to Nvidia.

Again, support for wireless dongles (not quite sure what you mean by a wireless dongle... is it the same as a wireless NIC?) again it all depends on whether the manufacturer has either produced drivers or made the technical specifications available for others to produce them. If you specify what make and model you have, it's easy enough to search the interweb to see what other users' experiences have been.

Digital cameras tend to fare much better... I've not come across one that doesn't just work, and I've used a fair few in my time.

Regarding games in Linux - it depends what games you mean. Games written for the Linux OS work great, but not all games written for the Windows OS work so well. There's a product called Cedega that can be used to get some Windows games to run under Linux. For some games it works great, but not all games run and even some of the ones that do run are almost unplayable. Saying that, I've yet to manage to get any games written specifically for Linux to work under Windows :D

Cedega keeps a database of which games work - and how well they work - so you can check compatability. Also, bear in mind that Cedega charge a very small monthly fee to use their software, get updates for new games, etc... Some people think that everything Linux-related must be free (as in beer) because the OS is, but it's not always the case and Cedega is one such product where they charge a fee to use it.

I couldn't find the original AvP in their database but there is AvP2... here's a screenshot of it running under Linux

http://games.cedega.com/gamesdb/screenshots/single.mhtml?screenshot_id=321

Hope that helps... if I missed anything out, feel free to pick me up on it :)
 
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