Who likes testing Linux?

[ishan_rulz]

There are quite many topics on Linux Distros. If you guys want to try something new, please do test Arch Linux and #!Crunchbang.

[login123]

Soooo many distros, soooo little time.

I will do this eventually, but not for 6 or 7 days, must be off the air for a while.

[Aethec]

There are lots of Linux distros, forks of distros, forks of forks of distros, and so on.... I found a nice image (however, it's really big. Dial-up users might not want to see it.)

 

That's one of the sad consequences of open-source - everyone has a slightly different view on how an OS should be done, and with Linux people create a fork instead of working with each other

[hazelnut]

As Aethec says there are just so many. Puppy is my favorite, followed by Kiwi and Mint. In fact one day I looked at the pile of live cd's I had and thought 'this is silly' So I threw out most of them

 

I've tried 3 distros in the last month, each one offers something different. It is a pity that they can't just work together to make one great one.

 

They are good to use for online banking if you feel unsafe

[ident]

Crunchbang is my main os

[DennisD]

I found a nice image (however, it's really big. Dial-up users might not want to see it.)

 

 

 

Good grief.

[login123]

Good grief.

 

Yes, Aethec, that was an evil thing to show to an installaholic.

[Aethec]

And there are some things missing, e.g. both versions of Peppermint OS...

[Andavari]

Yes, Aethec, that was an evil thing to show to an installaholic.

 

Should only take a few years to try them all out.

It's a rather impressive display that images shows.

[Nullack]

I stick with Ubuntu

 

The other distros really arent much different.

 

The upstream development hot spots are with Red Hat, SUSE, Intel and Apple.

 

Distro's can fiddle around a bit but the bulk of it is all standard, and anything thats not, can be brought back to standard by the user anyway

 

Personally I dont use Arch because of its weak security with taking too long to release patches for security issues and the fact it doesnt come with SELINUX / Tomoyo / AppArmor with good profiles. It's too hard to reinvent the wheel with a good profile for SELINUX or AppArmor by one user alone and it really takes a deliberate distro commitment like Fedora or Ubuntu to have profiles that are good.

[login123]

News from the doghouse. On here now from using Puppy 510.

 

Over in the peppermint thread there is a post which tells a way to keep Puppy 510 from auto-saving all changes. The post is HERE. I confirmed it by installing some things (clock, CPU monitor, etc, from "Pwidgets"), then rebooting and they were gone.

 

Well, there is also a "Save" icon on the Puppy desktop, and clicking it saves whatever you have installed even if you have the auto-save code lines commented out. So you can install something, if you like it hit the save button, if not, just reboot and it will be gone. This assumes that you also have the auto save option set to zero in Puppy event manager.

 

OK, probably everyone with a computer knew that, but I didn't, so there it is.

[Ishi]

I have tested a lot of Linux stuff and I still have their ISO's.

 

I have tested:

 

Solaris (tested on a CD and installed to a partition but I removed afterwards)

Ubuntu 10 ( tested on a CD and a USB but failed to be installed on the system)

Ubuntu 9 (tested on a CD and is currently installed on a different partition but cannot connect to the Internet)

Linux Mint 9 a.k.a Isadora (tested on my 4GB USB and its still there but failed to be installed on the system)

DSL "Damn Small Linux" ( tested on my USB but fails to boot in my idea)

Peppermint OS (tested on my 1GB USB and its still there but sadly does not have Open Office)

 

Maybe this should make you think I like testing Linux distros.

[Nergal]

Peppermint OS (tested on my 1GB USB and its still there but sadly does not have Open Office)

 

Maybe this should make you think I like testing Linux distros.

OPen office can be gotten, via software manager/Office Apps

[Ishi]

OPen office can be gotten, via software manager/Office Apps

Thanks for the tip.

 

I now have it formally installed. I think I now know the technique on how to make the Internet work well in there. Plus, with the Software Manager, I know have Open Office Writer and Open Office Calc installed instead of having the whole suite. It has a lot of these fancy cloud apps as well but it always shows me that permission denied warning if I try to get here in this forum from Peppermint's Firefox 4 Beta which also has problems with Yahoo Mail.

 

I still have my Ubuntu 9 on the other hand but I now have 3 operating systems installed on a single PC which is great.

[Ishi]

Now, I have successfully made a triple boot system. Windows 7 is still the best operating system among them but the two others are Peppermint and Linux Mint 9 who work well with me especially that I have used Wine to make Windows-compatible programs work with them.

 

Linux Mint 9 is far superior that Peppermint and my printer works with Mint 9 but fails in Peppermint. Linux Mint 9 also has the entire Open Office suite preinstalled.

 

My Internet would work good from those two if I would boot either one of them first before booting Windows 7 cause if I boot Windows first before my Linux distros, the connection will just go too slow on them. Its something I can't explain.

[login123]

Pretty impressive, ishi. Did you use a boot manager?

[redhawk]

Linux Mint's Bluetooth support is good I can use A2DP stereo audio with my headset and transfer files with my Sony Ericsson phone.

My only compliant so far is the mixer this is rather broken and messed up pretty much like Vista / Windows 7.

I cannot access one of the Aux channels for my Freeview box nor can I assign this to the mixer.

Furthermore mixers inputs can only be access if the sound card is recording, when in full duplex mode my audio crashes. :\

 

Richard S.

[Ishi]

Pretty impressive, ishi. Did you use a boot manager?

No, that's why I will have problems if I format a partition containing either one of my Linux distros cause that would remove their bootloaders as well and make booting of Windows 7 impossible and my only choice is to install another Linux distro with a Gnome bootloader.

 

Visually, I still think they could not contend with Windows 7, especially that only Windows 7 can make me watch live TV on my computer and I believe Linux Mint 9 also has audio problems. When I watch Youtube videos, I do feel the audio is distorted and the quality is not as good as in Windows.

[login123]

News from the dark side: Just used Puppy 510 to install the Slitaz ISO onto a mini-DVD, one of the 1.4 gb ones. Rebooted from the dvd, am on here now using the Midori browser in Slitaz. Selected the wrong keyboard on the first boot...you aren't gonna login if you do that, are you?

 

Slitaz is fast, haven't had time to explore much, but it looks like it has a vehicle for installing itself to a USB drive...be careful, if you select your storage drive by mistake you'll zap your files.

 

The whole live DVD creation process took about 5 minutes with verification, not counting my dithering around. Writing the ISO was less than a minute, so fast I thought it was a mistake. So about 5 minutes to create a shirt pocket OS, log on and post this. The print in Midori is so small I have to squint.

 

Gotta go.

 

DennisD, has anybody mentioned yet today that a new version of Puppy is out? 5.1.1, I think. Enjoy.

[hazelnut]

Slitaz is really hard to get your head around because you can't believe it's smaller than most av installers sizes and yet has so much on it. It's really a one off.

 

Don't remember the print in Midori being so small, I would have changed it I know if it was, I'm sure there'll be an option somewhere?

 

And stop being cruel to Dennis you know he suffers from installaholicism

[DennisD]

 

 

Get thee behind me login ...

[login123]

Its for your own good......he says, with a smug chuckle...

 

I'm off now to try to install Slitaz to a USB stick. Back in a flash.

[login123]

Back now, using Midori in Slitaz from a USB stick. Strange installation. Used the installer within Slitaz. Installed to USB from the live mini DVD that was in the dvd writer (I think??). Didn't think it worked, so logged back to Windows and made a cd w/ the ISO. Got ready to install to USB and it was already done. Pretty well clueless about how that happened.

 

But, it seems that Puppy is a bit more "windowish" than Slitaz, and that the extra applications in Puppy are worth the space they use. Right now trying to figure out how to save changes to Slitaz.

 

Edit: only way I have found to save changes to Slitaz is manually, by going into the XTerm editor and typing some code. But the bottom line is that it is do-able. edit #2...Maybe not. The dialogue said the changes were saved, but they were not. Back to the drawing board.

Edited September 15, 2010 by login123

[login123]

More news from the doghouse. On here now using Firefox in Puppy 5.1.1 from a USB stick. Can't see much difference from Puppy 5.1.0. This USB stick is formatted as fat 32, still boots OK. Files are visible from Win XP. They aren't visible in the ext2 file system without some extra software. Isn't that right?

 

'Nuther advantage of this little diversion is that you can try out a number of distros using the same rewritable CD or USB stick.

 

While trying to find out how long USB sticks last, I came across an old review (2004) that said that a 2 gb flash drive goes for about $700.00, but the price is expected to come down. HERE Anyone remember that they were ever that costly?

 

Found out that they last pretty well, lifespan depends on the number of writes to them, I think. Somewhere between 5,000 and 100,000 writes.

 

The quest for the cast iron, user configurable OS continues....

[DennisD]

 

The quest for the cast iron, user configurable OS continues....

 

PM me your address, and I'll send you some of my downloadaholic pills before you disappear up your overworked download location.

 

They really do work. For a few days.