Now, I know there are just as many options and suggestions out there as there are people, so bare with me, I have a very specific goal in mind.
First, what I will be converting is my current desktop system which sites idle 99% of the time these days and mainly serves Email Checking duties and File/Printer Sharing Duties. The system is a Tyan S2875 Tiger with Dual Opty 244's, 1 GB of RAM (soon to be upgraded to 2GB), a Raptor 74 GB Drive and a Seagate 160 GB Data drive.
In my searching, it seems like Samba will do 90% of the sharing stuff that I want no problem which is good. It also looks like most distros include Samba standard, also good. Presently, I have been kind of looking between 3 major contenders: openSuse, openSolaris, and Ubuntu. I have tried all 3 of these on one of my old laptops and they all seem to work relatively well, but since this was on my old, unstable system, I never got much beyond the core install, getting WiFi drivers up and working, and browsing the web.
Ubuntu seemed nice, but some of the nice desktop stuff worries me and makes me wonder how stable/usable it is a daily system (my main work on this system would be web development, which means I will probably be using Wine to port some Windows Software).
openSuse seemed to be pretty easy to use and straightforward, but I have heard horror stories about compatibility and such. I also wonder how well it is really maintained when they have their "Paid for Support" professional version instead.
openSolaris gives me some of the worries of openSuse. The other big item is that I have heard a lot of stories about slow(er) speeds and software incompatibilities with Solaris due to changes in its Libraries, etc.
I personal have a lot of experience with Solaris (8) at work, but the type of programming I do there doesn't really require the graphical side as much as I will need to be able to do Web Development on this system.
Ultimately, most of the desktop tasks can fall on my Laptop without a problem, so long as I can get file and printer sharing up and running.
Does anyone have any good suggestions as to which OS would be best to go with, and what the best plan of attack would be. My biggest concern is wiping my current system as it has over 2 years of new data, and some data dating back as far as 10+ years. I have it all backed up elsewhere, but I would probably install this OS on a new set of Drives, and then later merge all my data from my other 2 drives once everything seems to be up and running stably.
Thanks for any help/suggestions, and sorry for my long winded question.
First, what I will be converting is my current desktop system which sites idle 99% of the time these days and mainly serves Email Checking duties and File/Printer Sharing Duties. The system is a Tyan S2875 Tiger with Dual Opty 244's, 1 GB of RAM (soon to be upgraded to 2GB), a Raptor 74 GB Drive and a Seagate 160 GB Data drive.
In my searching, it seems like Samba will do 90% of the sharing stuff that I want no problem which is good. It also looks like most distros include Samba standard, also good. Presently, I have been kind of looking between 3 major contenders: openSuse, openSolaris, and Ubuntu. I have tried all 3 of these on one of my old laptops and they all seem to work relatively well, but since this was on my old, unstable system, I never got much beyond the core install, getting WiFi drivers up and working, and browsing the web.
Ubuntu seemed nice, but some of the nice desktop stuff worries me and makes me wonder how stable/usable it is a daily system (my main work on this system would be web development, which means I will probably be using Wine to port some Windows Software).
openSuse seemed to be pretty easy to use and straightforward, but I have heard horror stories about compatibility and such. I also wonder how well it is really maintained when they have their "Paid for Support" professional version instead.
openSolaris gives me some of the worries of openSuse. The other big item is that I have heard a lot of stories about slow(er) speeds and software incompatibilities with Solaris due to changes in its Libraries, etc.
I personal have a lot of experience with Solaris (8) at work, but the type of programming I do there doesn't really require the graphical side as much as I will need to be able to do Web Development on this system.
Ultimately, most of the desktop tasks can fall on my Laptop without a problem, so long as I can get file and printer sharing up and running.
Does anyone have any good suggestions as to which OS would be best to go with, and what the best plan of attack would be. My biggest concern is wiping my current system as it has over 2 years of new data, and some data dating back as far as 10+ years. I have it all backed up elsewhere, but I would probably install this OS on a new set of Drives, and then later merge all my data from my other 2 drives once everything seems to be up and running stably.
Thanks for any help/suggestions, and sorry for my long winded question.