Fedora or Ubuntu.

Both have new releases coming soon, and I will be dual-booting linux soon.

I have used both before and both suit me, but do any of you recommend one to the other i.e. the pros and cons?

Thanks

 

I prefer Ubuntu just because .deb is better than .rpm imo.

 

Well, I liked Fedora 8 as it had pulseaudio instead of alsa.

Now the new release of Ubuntu has pulseaudio and much more

Ubuntu wins hands down.

 

Ubuntu, much better community support.
For rpm based distro, you can give mandriva 2008 spring a try.

 

Or PCLinux OS, which is good.
I like Ubuntu, just because of the deb package system & all of the support.

 

If your wireless is intel 4965 stay away from PCLinux

 

I have a Dell M1330 on order and will load either Fedora/Debian/SUSE or something new.
On the last workstation I used Fedora 7 and enjoyed it.
However, there was no support for NetGear Wireless Cards.

It took me a week to get the wisdom necessary to bring several pieces of software together for the Wireless card to fire up.

I brought this up as an example of needs. Do you know if Ubantu has any better support for the very unsupported wireless industry than Fedora did?

I use PHP, MySQL, Apache Server as well as program in Java and C++ so these needs are Alpha important and does Ubantu support programming environments?

Thanks for any input.
Chetanji

 

Linux support for wireless in general is dependent on the chipset of the wireless device. Atheros chipsets currently have the best support overall. Broadcomm chipsets are about the worst, and Intel chips can be problematic, though will work decently for "normal" use. If you are planning on using your netgear card it would help to know the specific model and revision, since chipsets often change even within the same model number.

I have a Netgear WG511T pcmcia card which has an atheros chipset. I have used this card under Debian (Sarge/Etch/Lenny) and Ubuntu (Gutsy Gibbon/Hardy Heron), where it works flawlessly using the tried and true madwifi driver. When I tried the Fedora Core 9 preview, which uses the newer ath5k driver for atheros chipsets, the card would work but there were problems with frequent disconnects from my ap. I also had this same problem with the opensuse beta which also uses ath5k.

Except for Java, which I have never touched from a programming perspective, I have used the other development applications you mention with no probem under Debian and Ubuntu.

 

I would have to say Ubuntu. Fedora 8 Core for me was rock solid, but wasn't windows network friendly (I have one) but I don't know about the new version. I use Kubuntu 8.04 btw. I think they are both extremely reliable for the casual user, i.e. you can download updates and don't have to worry about the system going screwy

Mandriva Spring is the Cat's A$$ I had a virtualbox glitch and had to ditch it, shame. That will be fixed in time, so if you don't need VB non free edition (VB OSE works fine from the repos) then definately check it out. EDIT: non free VB worked fine for others, there was something going on with my hardware somewhere, or/ could have been a setting, but myself and a few others couldn't find it..YMMV

 

To complete Proteus' response: programing Java in Ubuntu is not a problem. The entire JDK can be installed easily and you can install Eclipse for a Java-oriented IDE.