Etch, Ubunto, or ?

Background. Now that Vista is here and I may have to learn a new OS, a friend said that I should try Linux. He has used Red Hat for several years and then moved to Debian. He gave me a Sarge 3.1 CD and I installed it, changed the sources.list file to point to Etch and off I went. After 4 weeks of "learning" about apt-get, aptitude, sudoers, and so on with lots of mistakes and a few successes, I want to make a new clean install and go about things in a more organized fashion. The install will be on a 5 year old dell, p4, 384MB ram, and 400MHz clock. I have read a lot about how to install Etch but I thought I would ask how Etch compares to the other Linux versions.

I did try Knoppix on my Gateway 7510gx but wireless did not work because of the Broadcom chip and the computer would not shutdown. I had to pull the battery. That is the reason for the Dell install. I will have other questions in the future but will try to keep them to one per post.

Thanks, David

 

I think for (*)Ubuntu is an excellent introduction to Linux in general. It has really good hardware support and an excellent forum/community.

Not sure if they still do it, but I was sure you could get a dvd sent to you for free. If they still do it, what have you got to lose?

 

Well, Debian has one of the slowest release cycles of any Linux distro. The advantages to this approach is that it is generally rock solid. The downside is that you are more often than not behind the rest of the community in version number.

Ubuntu is based on Debian, but is a bit more up to date. You'll still use the same commands, so your Debian knowledge wont go to waste.

Either Debian or Ubuntu will run great on your machine. You can't go wrong with either.

 

Thanks to both of you for your advice. I will install Etch on the Dell and get play with some live CDs on my laptop. I know that I will come back later with additional questions.

David

 

I suggest sidux. It's debian unstable, so it's always fresh and up-to-date. The sidux developers add helpful scripts for getting things like wireless configured right, and video cards, and so on. They also figure out and tell the rest of the community when upgrades will break your system, and they make fixes for the things that get broken so we can keep our systems up. The forums are very friendly and helpful. www.sidux.com