Re: Re: Ok. Heh, is there still an smtp-based list out here:D

Hi,

On this day of 01/31/2007 04:55 AM, Mattias Westlund saw fit to scribe:
> What I meant was more like "I hope whatever distro I might choose won't
> require me to wipe the endire disk" or something. 

Well, that's sort of what I meant... doing the partitioning means you
don't have to wipe the whole disk. And all the distributions' installers
I've tried have been very good about leaving the Windows partition intact.

> XP will be reinstalled
> anyway, but there's also two other partitions with a lot of other stuff
> on them that I would rather not have to move to someplace else. I've
> only set up a Win/nix dual boot once before, on a friend's machine, and
> at that time we used a completely blank drive. I just created a Win
> partition, installed XP, and then let the Linux installer do pretty much
> what it wanted with the remaining free space. But I guess I'll have to
> back everything up anyway so maybe I shouldn't worry about it.

Seems like a wise course of action to me. :)


> The question is: which distro? I've already ruled out Ubuntu
> (everything's brown and I don't like the gnome interface). 

Brian mentioned how easy it is to change the theme. I use Ubuntu and my
desktop is no longer brown at all and is back to happy blue. Fedora is
blue by default, if I remember correctly, so if you really care strongly
about the initial appearance you can try that.

Regarding gnome I would suggest the same thing; you can tweak it
extensively. If you don't like it, use KDE or something like that. There
aren't a whole ton of other very mainstream window managers, but you can
poke around. You might want to look at fluxbox, xfce, ion3, and a few
others I'm forgetting.


> I installed
> PCLinuxOS for that friend I mentioned, but the installation died for
> some reason only a few months later -- I don't remember why. I've tried
> Mandriva in the past and it worked well, but it seemed a tad on the
> bloated side.
> 
> Any suggestions?

Most of my experience has been with Ubuntu and Fedora and it was very
positive with both of those. We run Debian on our family server but you
probably care about the GUI and in that instance we couldn't care less
what the desktop environment looks like. I tried Gentoo some time ago
but that failed miserably due to not having the right drivers for my
laptop's LAN/wireless cards. I was new enough to being a Linux sysadmin
at the time that I didn't feel like fixing things by hand. I would not
recommend Debian for a GUI-based system, because that's not really what
they're interested in producing and Ubuntu is basically Debian geared
towards the desktop anyhow, as I understand things.

Unfortunately, my experience is that very little will actually give you
what you want out of the box. You will invariably have to tweak things
quite extensively to get it the way you want. It's annoying in some
ways, but very fulfilling when you're actually done. (That being said, I
don't think it's possible to be "actually done"...)

Cheers,
- David

-- 
David C. Haley
http://david.the-haleys.org

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