An Intro to Linux Distros and Live CDs

Linuxaria ^ | 23 October 2011 | linuxari

[ShadowAce]

DistroWatch for lists/reviews of linux distros.

FrozenTech's list of Live CDs.

[ShadowAce]

[ShadowAce]

[ShadowAce]

I like Fedora. It's what I have on my personal laptop, and it fits in nicely with my work environment.

[bigbob]

Try before you buy, then “buy” for free!

Puppy Linux will give an old slow PC a new lease on life. I know a guy who’s been using it to recycle donated PCs for military families.

[NewHampshireDuo]

I’m a Ubuntu fan since many communications applications that I use are based on it.

[JRandomFreeper]

I started with the original Slackware on floppies. I'm running SUSE 11.1 on my personal laptop. SUSE 11.2 on my FreeRadius servers. I think I still have Fedora on one or two legacy boxes. And the old 2.4.19 kernel on an ARM appliance.

But, whatever I pick, and works for the need, I stick with it. I'm not big on updates and moving to the newest.

I have work to do, and don't have time to be installing and figuring out new distros.

/johnny

[ShadowAce]

My kids' computer has Ubuntu on it.

To be honest--and it's probably a lack of familiarity on my part--I don't like it as much. It's based on Debian, and most of my experience (and job experience) has been Red Hat.

[re_nortex]

I'm biased toward Linux from Scratch. I use that a starting point for my homegrown, heavily-customized system. Every single component is built from source (Acrobat Reader and Flash are among the few exceptions) and tweaked for my CPU. Plus the kernel is light, comprised of only the features and drivers that I have on my platform.

[Nervous Tick]

Thanks for the links.

I had no idea there were so many live CD distros!

Live distro-wise, I’ve only used Linux Mint... it works fine for my purposes.

[ShadowAce]

I’ve explored Linux From Scratch, but it’s been several years. Has it gotten any easier?

[JRandomFreeper]

Real men pipe /dev/ttyS0 to /dev/audio and listen to the bits fly by. ;)

/johnny

[ShadowAce]

#!/bin/bash

say() { mplayer “http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?q=$1";; }

[Paradox]

7 years ago I was in to Gentoo, like it fast. Today? Mostly Win XP and 7, seems I have just lost it for Linux. I mean, I tried Ubuntu a couple of years ago, and yeah it was super cool/easy, etc, but I'm back on Win 7.

I guess I will try Linux again soon, especially to open the potential doors to other employment. Question, what distro is the most used out there in the "paying" world, Redhat?

[Michael Barnes]

/12.1

[Michael Barnes]

your command line fu is strong.

[ShadowAce]

I would say Red Hat is the most popular out there.

To learn it, you can use CentOS or Fedora.

[steve86]

SUSE 11.4 has been real good and the upgrade was smooth. Lets you make an easy update to KDE 4.7 with improved performance. But stay away from SUSE 12.1 (RC right now). Been a disaster.

[JRandomFreeper]

I have Festival installed on my machines so they don't need net access to talk to me. ;)

/johnny

[steve86]

Puppy Linux is cute and slick in so many ways but I have never been able to get wireless to work (and keep working) satisfactorily, but for desktops a few years old it is great. For really old desktops and laptops (like my 400 Mhz Celeron) you want something like AntiX, as current Puppy is just too big a bite.