Distro hopping?

Wally Balljacker · Post by **Wally Balljacker** » Thu Mar 13, 2008 3:45 pm

Do any of you still switch from distro to distro? It seems like almost everyone these days is running some variant of Ubuntu on their desktop, or they have settled on something else. I've pretty much settled on Gentoo, although I still use Mac OS X and FreeBSD from time to time.

mowestusa · Post by **mowestusa** » Thu Mar 13, 2008 4:17 pm

Not a big fan of Ubuntu. I use Fedora and Foresight.

I also use the odd distro or BSD on old hardware that can't run a modern Gnome or KDE. I also use some special purpose distros or BSD as well. I use GeeXBoX on my "entertainment" computer (the one hooked to the TV and stereo), and I use FreeNAS on my file server box.

Still looking for something that will install and run in CLI only for an old Pentium 166 with 128megs of RAM. Probably will use it as a podcast jukebox in the garage this summer.

Right now the only thing that seems likely is a NetBSD install.

Post by **Patrick** » Fri Mar 14, 2008 2:37 pm

Not so much for my production boxes. I have a couple spare drives in hot swappable drive bays that I test out other distros on. I'm going to try out the new PC-BSD and Foresight Linux in the next few days.

allix · Post by **allix** » Fri Mar 14, 2008 5:14 pm

Wally Balljacker wrote: I still use Mac OS X

Yet another machead

At the moment I have debian testing on the desktop , fedora 7 on a old laptop and i did have fedora 8 on the new laptop until it stopped working and started smoking.. Dell customer service sucks.. I spoke to them on Monday night and was told someone is going to pick it up the following day, so nothing happened the following day , not even a phone call, so i called Tuesday and was told someone is going to call again to arrange a time when to pick it up, so nothing for two days, so Thursday i call and the same conversation and nobody called me today so i called again and the same thing..
Lets see what happens next week....

Anyone else had bad experience with dells customer service?

davijordan · Post by **davijordan** » Fri Mar 14, 2008 11:20 pm

I just moved a apple g3 to debian from os9.
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As for Dell, try to ask for a supervisor. In the several years I had to deal with Dell support as a tech with premier access (which does not mean a whole lot) that usually did the job. They should of also given you a number so that you can check online for the status. Giving negative feedback nicely on the website also helps.

snarkout · Post by **snarkout** » Sat Mar 15, 2008 3:15 pm

Customer service sucks period - it's being cut back on and offshored at a disturbing rate. Basically, anything that cannot be shown to actually generate revenue is having the same thing done to it - IT and Tech Support as well. Even major network vendors have such a skeleton crew these days, I know the tech support staff at most of our vendors by first name. Welcome to the greedhead years of technology - it's been getting steadily worse for, well, years.

davijordan · Post by **davijordan** » Sat Mar 15, 2008 8:03 pm

I almost live withing spitting distance of Dell site so to speak. I need to go visit their campus and check things out and offer some bit of wisdom.
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edit: removed unneeded rhetoric.

Post by **dann** » Sun Mar 16, 2008 10:03 am

mowestusa wrote:Still looking for something that will install and run in CLI only for an old Pentium 166 with 128megs of RAM. Probably will use it as a podcast jukebox in the garage this summer. Right now the only thing that seems likely is a NetBSD install.

Arch or slackware shoukd do it. I use arch for a jukebox server.

Chess · Post by **Chess** » Sun Mar 16, 2008 10:21 am

I don't really distro hop, but I do have a variety of boxes running various OS's. My primary gatewall and firewall runs OpenBSD on a Soekris 4801. One workstation runs Slackware and the other FreeBSD. My laptops run OpenBSD, Arch, and Slackware. My wife's/kids laptop runs Ubuntu. My servers run Debian, Slackware, and FreeBSD. No Windows in this house since 2001.

mowestusa · Post by **mowestusa** » Sun Mar 16, 2008 10:35 am

dann wrote: Arch or slackware shoukd do it. I use arch for a jukebox server.

Thanks for the tip Dann. Slackware is under consideration, because it is normally an easy install, and the documentation is great for making the configurations. I honestly have never used Arch, scared off by the install. However, an Arch install can't be any harder than a NetBSD install which is pretty manual, or a Slackware install, and I have done both without issue.

Does Arch have lots of CLI apps in the repos? I know with Slackware, I would have to compile some of the ones that I would want to use in the CLI, but compiling on Slackware is so nice, because all the needed libraries and tools always seem to be there in Slackware.

Thanks again Dann for a great suggestion, something to consider.

snarkout · Post by **snarkout** » Sun Mar 16, 2008 10:48 am

Yes, arch is extremely CLI friendly since many of the devs use CLI tools in favor of their GUI cousins - so much so that some people get pissy because there *aren't* GUI replacements for some fo the CLI tools. If you count the aur as a repo, then Arch has nearly as many packages as Debian (well, ok, that may be stretching it, but 99.9% of what I've ever looked for has been available for Arch in one form or another).

davijordan · Post by **davijordan** » Sun Mar 16, 2008 12:11 pm

slackware or a derivative is probably the best choice for an old machine, but net install of debian and use icewm for a desktop is not bad either.

mowestusa · Post by **mowestusa** » Sun Mar 16, 2008 4:56 pm

Snarkout wrote:Yes, arch is extremely CLI friendly since many of the devs use CLI tools in favor of their GUI cousins - so much so that some people get pissy because there *aren't* GUI replacements for some fo the CLI tools. If you count the aur as a repo, then Arch has nearly as many packages as Debian (well, ok, that may be stretching it, but 99.9% of what I've ever looked for has been available for Arch in one form or another).

Well, I checked out your claims, and you are right. They have snownews, alpine, remind, wyrd, and asciidoc. Between the main repos and aur. That is impressive. Not many of the none standard distros have all of the CLI tools that I have come to love in a CLI desktop. I might give Arch a try. This would be the 4th different packaging system that I would have to learn.

Fedora did not install, and I'm pretty sure a Foresight install would fail, and it would install a lot of stuff that I wouldn't be able to use. So, I'll have to see, I would always have NetBSD to fall back on.

allix · Post by **allix** » Mon Mar 17, 2008 8:08 am

UPS came today and picked it up, I will give it 2 weeks at least for the replacement.

snarkout · Post by **snarkout** » Mon Mar 17, 2008 7:41 pm

mowestusa wrote:Well, I checked out your claims, and you are right. They have snownews, alpine, remind, wyrd, and asciidoc. Between the main repos and aur. That is impressive. Not many of the none standard distros have all of the CLI tools that I have come to love in a CLI desktop. I might give Arch a try. This would be the 4th different packaging system that I would have to learn. Fedora did not install, and I'm pretty sure a Foresight install would fail, and it would install a lot of stuff that I wouldn't be able to use. So, I'll have to see, I would always have NetBSD to fall back on.

I missed your initial post that indicated what sort of hardware you're installing on - Arch is i686, unfortunately.

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