Come on, evangalise your distro to me...

L1011

My Knoebuntu horrible frankenstein on this laptop is now crufty to the point on unusable, and I will in one or two days have the right optical drive to boot CD's finally, so I can move distros, finally

I'm pretty well versed in Linux (and unix in general) this stage, and I want to go for a non-newbie distro. Did I mention it has to support FTP install (can't download files >300MB reliably...)

I'll use anything that support the intricities of my hardware - currently it seems none of the BSD's do, only Windows, BeOS and Linux have the Sony drivers needed

So evangelise away - tell me why I should use whatever distro you push all the time. I want recent software, but stability also.

Nietzschean

Debian/Fedora would be the front runners, of the 2 i'd be a debian fan... it has some nice business card iso's for network installing
(faster to download stuff for me than copy it off a cd...)

maxheadroom

MYOB wrote:

I'm pretty well versed in Linux (and unix in general) this stage, and I want to go for a non-newbie distro. Did I mention it has to support FTP install (can't download files >300MB reliably...)

This sentance just screams gentoo at me Give it a try, you won't regret it.

nadir

yeah, gentoo all the way baby XD

tomk

MYOB wrote:

.....non-newbie distro......FTP install......recent software.....

Arch Linux

Also

MYOB wrote:

can't download files >300MB reliably...

arch-0.7-base.iso is 214MB.

No evangelising here - enjoy whatever you end up with.

ishnid

If you're actively desiring to get `down and dirty' with a non-newbie distro, I'd second (third?) Gentoo. The package management (portage) is *excellent* and the community at http://forums.gentoo.org is outstanding.

As an alternative - any thing debian-based.

Syth

Gentoo or slackware. I'd think slack is harder in the long run due to it's very poor automated package system.

de8o

Just my €0.02. I use SUSE 9.2 I use it all the time and so do my family. (Even my 5 year old son). I will try the new version of debian if and when it is released.

Fenster

I use Gentoo. Generally not user friendly to set up, but its running, a toddler could maintain it. Rock solid as well.

Khannie

I installed ubuntu at home last week. It's a debian spinoff. "Linux for human beings" is the slogan. Absolutely delighted with it. Even the mrs and son love it. It's a very lightweight install, but there is a script available for downloading a bunch of "essentials" (cd burning progs, etc.) here.

The forums at www.ubuntuforums.org are very busy too.

Edit: The default apt-get repository is "recent but stable". You said you were looking for that

oscarBravo

I recently installed Ubuntu on my Dell Inspiron 6000. Lovely install - all the hardware seems to be working perfectly, including the widescreen display and built-in WiFi. Also, the installer was able to shrink the NTFS partition effortlessly for a painless dual-boot.

Capt'n Midnight

Knoppix 3.9 is out. And it picks up some SATA drives that 3.8 didn't

Doesn't appear to have the megaraid driver built in though..

(3.8 could only pick them up after a soft reboot from XP or 2.4 Kernel)

Khannie

oscarBravo wrote:

Also, the installer was able to shrink the NTFS partition effortlessly for a painless dual-boot.

OMG! That's QUALITY.

I too was well impressed with the ease of install. I chose the "automatic" install mind you

Red Alert

Gentoo or slack mainly, i found slackware to be very stable but once I wanted to integrate LDAP auth it had to go. Gentoo's great - the ebuild system is to die for.

At the moment i'm in a BSD phase - my file server currently runs FreeBSD and the to-be-built firewall/remote login/web server will run OpenBSD 3.7. I like the ease of use of FreeBSD, once installed it just works.

Laptop: Dual boot WinXP/Gentoo
Desktop: Dual boot WinXP/Gentoo
File Server: FreeBSD 5.4

If I was trying to convert a corporate person like my dad i'd recommend Novell Suse Linux.