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Recommendations?

buzzard34

Gawd
Joined
Feb 14, 2004
Messages
619
Looking to upgrade my FC2 install...the only requirement I am asking is that the distros i look at come with GRUB, other than that I am more than happy to take the plunge and work with stuff like Slack and Arch. I looked at SuSe and Debian, was a little leery of the D/L process and decided that maybe a distro that fit on a single CD would work best. Not afraid to download a DVD-ISO, its just that im kinda impatient since the burner i would work with would probably take helluva long time to write ;) I don't mind compiling, but I would prefer that RPM support was offered too, since I have a lot of those laying around. :D Yes I am still n00bish when it comes to linux so I don't mind anyone suggesting something really easy, like Red Hat. :D
 
Since you're willing to learn, why not try out Gentoo? Gentoo is capable of installing packages via RPM, but more than likely, you will find anything you need already in the portage tree as an ebuild. Even things that are distributed as only an RPM (think ATI drivers) are in our tree. It will take a good bit of getting used to having to do all the work yourself of configuring packages, but in the end, you'll know more about your system than ever before and hopefully you'll enjoy Gentoo as much as I do.
 
What do you not like about FC that is causing you to want to choose another distro? This may help with recommendations.
 
Its just that FC has gotten a little boring...not to mention I wiped GRUB out on accident and thus wish to install a different distro (not because I deleted GRUB).
 
You could always try Mepis. http://www.mepis.org It is a live distro on one CD. You pop the CD in, boot off the CD, and bingo, you are in Linux. If you like it you go into the install utilities, and tell it to install the the HD. Done. It is really easy, and easy to keep up to date.

The only thing to remember is don't do a apt-get upgrade. Ever! Just update the packages you need to update.

I'm using Mepis on my laptop at home, and a desktop.
 
Ok but I already have DamnSmallLinux for a livecd...I'm d/l Gentoo rite now becuase i want something to install to an HDD.
 
Go w/ gentoo, ubuntu, or if you are looking for a challenge, freebsd. once you get used to the package management in any one of the operating systems, you can never go back to that shit^h^h^h^h unnacceptable tool called rpm. The package management makes or breaks the OS imo.
 
j-rock said:
Go w/ gentoo, ubuntu, or if you are looking for a challenge, freebsd. once you get used to the package management in any one of the operating systems, you can never go back to that shit^h^h^h^h unnacceptable tool called rpm. The package management makes or breaks the OS imo.

:D for some strange reason you remind of my friend who is a Slackman, who has the exact same opinions of RPMs. :D

D/L gentoo, now i gotta figure out how to burn it right and install correctly...does Gentoo offer 56k support? as in softmodem (winmodem/internal) support?
 
buzzard34 said:
:D for some strange reason you remind of my friend who is a Slackman, who has the exact same opinions of RPMs. :D
I can understand why (Slackware guy myself), RPM's are a bigger PITA. Im sorry but depchecking is just a difficulty, esspecially done like that. Now portage is pretty cool, and if it weren't for Gento, even from stage 1 install, requiring PAM, I would use it. Simple fact is most distros use PAM, but its caused to many issues for me to trust, which is another reason I use slack. That doesn't mean I wouldn't suggest it, depends on the situtation, I dont' really need the PAM stuff in a home setting any how.
 
requires PAM? dont tell me some chick has to come over and do weird things in order to get gentoo to install properly. What the hell is PAM?
 
SOme of the distro's mentioned, Ubuntu and Mepis (one of my favs) are great choices. There is also PC Linux OS. Based off of Mandrake...it's on 1 cd and is allready tricked out and customized for your pleasure...Firefox, APT, Limewire, several different Media Players, etc.
 
buzzard34 said:
requires PAM? dont tell me some chick has to come over and do weird things in order to get gentoo to install properly. What the hell is PAM?

A security systems component. (A way of gluing authentication methods and things that require authentication together, and more, I think. Haven't honestly looked into it.)

Opinions towards its security differ. I've seen slackware devs call it a "security hole", while there hasn't been a pam-related security advisory for FreeBSD since one in pam-pgsql in 2002.
 
I don't think the BSD's implementation is the same though, its the linux one that seems to have issues.
 
Xipher said:
I don't think the BSD's implementation is the same though, its the linux one that seems to have issues.

Quite possible.
(Yet another reason for staying with my BSD, I think. :D )
 
Gentoo doesn't require PAM, just apply the -pam USE flag and your set when doing a stage 1 install.
 
puck said:
Gentoo doesn't require PAM, just apply the -pam USE flag and your set when doing a stage 1 install.
Try it yourself, doing it from stage one, you won't be able to login, as they use cracklib (which in order to be used, requires pam). I did, and it blew up in my face (twice). Ill see if I can find the thread I mentioned it in on the forums over there.

EDIT: can't find it, they must have cleaned up while I was gone, as none of my posts exist any more. Basicly what happens is it gets through boot, but bombs out when it goes to login (IIRC). If you have a spare machine, feel free to try it.
 
I'm just curious, could you fix it from singleuser or did you have to do something more aggressive?
("Wipe and reinstall" counts as "more aggressive", yes. :D )
 
Xipher said:
Try it yourself, doing it from stage one, you won't be able to login, as they use cracklib (which in order to be used, requires pam). I did, and it blew up in my face (twice). Ill see if I can find the thread I mentioned it in on the forums over there.

EDIT: can't find it, they must have cleaned up while I was gone, as none of my posts exist any more. Basicly what happens is it gets through boot, but bombs out when it goes to login (IIRC). If you have a spare machine, feel free to try it.

I'm uninstalling PAM right now, I've been meaning to do it for awhile.
 
Oy gentoo is already giving me problems. Turns out I just D/L the package CD and now i need the frigging LiveCD. oh woe is me :eek:
 
check out distrowatch.com for a good list of distros, they have a list of included packages, links to reviews and forums and all that good stuff, i find that site real handy when choosing distros. I myself have settled on fedora after trying Mandrake, Suse, Debian (Mabey i shouldnt have tried stable), and Vector.
 
well I got Fedora up and working again, but I'm still going to try other distros. I plan on installing Archlinux later today and eventually Slackware. Until I get DSL or broadband I'll have to leave gentoo alone. :(
 
Slackware is my favorite of all the linux distros out there, though I must say that I haven't tried Gentoo or Mepis yet (been meaning to try but too many existing projects are in the way). I've been stuck in *BSD land lately and then got out of using Linux regularly once I started using OS X.

Not to derail the thread or anything, but I installed Solaris 10 at work and tried out the new Java Desktop environment. I am rather impressed! It's a free download. It comes in 5 downloadable chunks that turn into a DVD ISO once you cat them all together. :D
 
I uninstalled pam and had no problems.

Just added the -pam USE flag, removed pam-login and pam

ran emerge --newuse world to recompile packages that were priviously compiled with pam as a dep,
after that no problems.
 
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