[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.

[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.

[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?

[DJ MacWoW]

Do You Want FR To Survive?

Click The Starving Forum Skeleton To Donate

Then Support Your Forum

[martin_fierro]

[shorty_harris]

I’ve slowly been switching over from linux to Mac OSX. I don’t like the Ubuntu Unity interface, and I have to keep a windows XP virtual machine on my linux computer just to use my scanner. Seems like too much work these days...maybe I’m getting too old. Soon I’ll be buying a new iMac, and I’ll retire the old linux computer.

[fremont_steve]

One “fact” in the article is incorrect - Live CD’s have been around since 1995ish - Yggdrasil was the first such entry. For those who don’t like to “update” the real problem I’ve had personally is hacked systems. I’ve had a system up and running exposed to the internet hacked twice. It had ftp and http deamons exposed - and these were used as infestation vectors. I’ve found if I do an update about once a year, this tends to not be a real problem.

Over the years I’ve moved from SLS to Slackware to Suse to Ubuntu. I’ve tried many - I’m not real keen on Unity at the moment, and prefer Gnome-2 mostly because it ISN’T that different from what I expect. I have Unity up at home, and Gnome-2 at work.

Unity also had real stability issues on bleeding edge Intel hardware like Sandybridge that was one of my problems with it.

[Conan the Librarian]

I have Knoppix (debian) on a USB drive that works great. I just save anything I need on another USB.

Saved my butt when the hard disk in my laptop died.

[jjsheridan5]

I have ubuntu on one of my computers. Very sluggish (I forget which GUI I have). Anyway, I am looking for a command-line only distro. The main requirement is speed. The only app I run on it is CherryPy. I would also love a replacement for vi (no matter how much I use it, I can never remember how to do anything with it, without the cheat sheet), but don’t want to have to run a GUI.

Any suggestions?

[Bikkuri]

I have been away from Linux for almost 10 years now.. Didn’t like the Red Hat back then, so I went back to Win..

A couple of months ago I went the easy path and DL/Installed UBUNTU on my laptop. I have had no problems with it so far.. but after advice from a friend in Holland, I searched and found ‘CentOS-6.0-i386-LiveDVD’...

I have not messed with it yet, so I have no idea how it looks.

I am worried that it will be FAR off from the midway point (UBUNTU - Win)..

I used to use unix (decades ago), but I don’t remember the commands.. I at least remember most DOS commands :D

Anyway, any advice on whether I should try it out or not?

[2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten]

Probably heresy to say this - but although I like LiveCD’s as rescue disks - the idea that you slap a LiveCD into a disk drive and then find out if you “like” a distro or no - to me doesn’t really make sense.

Whether I like a distro has to do with how it feels to live with the actual distro - set it up to do real work - a Live CD “test drive” will show you what the user experience “feels like” - but not sure I buy how useful that is in real life.

YMMV.

[MarineBrat]

After a (cross country) family member had a rootkit/trojan on their PC last week, and I “theoretically” got rid of it for them, I suggested to them they create a bootable Linux CD to use for online banking. I decided to test one here, so I downloaded Ubuntu 11.10 and created the disk. I booted my Win7 x64 laptop to the disk and tried it out for a while.

When I rebooted to Win7 it was royally pi**ed about something, and insisted on “recovering” by restoring a system restore. During the time I was running the Ubuntu disk I never once asked it to modify my existing partition.

Now I’m trying to locate a decent bootable Linux disk that can be simply used for online banking purposes, that will guarantee to not touch any existing partitions. Ubuntu has me gun shy.

[Steely Tom]

I just went through a terrible experience with a certain flavor of Linux that is distributed by a used-to-be-well-known company that was the original pioneer of computer networking. I'll not give the name of the company, but I will say that the first letter of it's name is "N".

This distro was so trouble-ridden, so messed up, so full of misbegotten cybernetic dreck, that it cost me two consecutive all-nighters to do something that literally took all of thirty seconds once I blew it off my new Dell server and installed a totally free alternative distro.

I will give the name of the alternative that has now made me very happy and made the learning of wonderful, fascinating Linux the enjoyable experience it should be.

Ubuntu.

[21stCenturion]

...

[expat_panama]

...there aren’t any “Linux Stores”. Money’s just not there...

There is a lot of money, it's just not in stores.  A few days ago I bought Red Hat (RHT) and it's already made me $800 richer.  It's hard for most people to understand where technology has gone and how a $9B S&P500 company make money giving away software.  It does.