Looking for a good Linux distro...

[jdogg707]

I am looking for a good Linux distro that is going to allow my hardware to work without having to install a million drivers, since I'm still pretty new to the Linux thing, but am looking to learn. My system is the following:

AMD Athlon XP 2500+ @ 3200+
Abit NF7-S v. 2.0 Motherboard
512MB OCZ PC3200 Platinum Dual Channel RAM
Plextor PX-708A DVD+/-RW
Lite-On 16x DVD-ROM
36GB Raptor
120GB Western Digital WD1200JD SATA Hard Drive (Both SATA drives are on SiliconImage 3112A SATA Adapter)
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro
Sound Blaster Audigy 2
Netgear MA311 Wireless PCI Card
Logitech MX700 Mouse
Leadtek WinFast TV2000XP Deluxe TV Tuner Card

I was looking at SuSE Linux 9.0 or Linux Mandrake 9.2....any suggestions? Thanks a lot.

 

[Need4Speed]

how about reading the hardware compatibility lists for each? bot of them are excellent distros for a newbie to try out

 

[drag]

Everything should work right off of the bat with no extra drivers I think.

Try out SUSE. It was always able to have my TV capture card work right off of the bat.


Unfortuanatley SUSE does not provide a CDROM image to install completely from. There are a 16 meg boot CD that you can use to install the OS directly from a FTP mirror.

They also provide a "live eval" CDROM that you can run your computer from without installing anything from the HD. Another distro like this is Knoppix. Both are aviable from links from linuxiso.org. You can try out linux easy that way and then figure out all the stuff you need to do to get everything working properly.

The main issues your going to face is getting 3d acceleration working for your ATI card. The next issue is that NVIDIA doesn't provide good support for their Nforce boards. The issues will be the same for no matter what distro you would use. You can download nforce (1 or 2, doesn't mattter) drivers from nvidia's website. Maybe burn them to a disk, because the onboard NIC won't work with out them. The ATI card should work fine right off of the bat, so you can get the non-free accelerated drivers and install them later and still have a gui from the get go.

The issues with the nforce board will end up being resolved with the new 2.6 series of kernels, and maybe with the newer versions of the 2.4 kernel, not to sure.

 

[jdogg707]

Thanks for the info!

 

[osage]

as stated above Suse is a good distro, and the live eval CD will let you get your feet wet quickly.

check here and read some of the linked reviews for the various distros, be sure to check the hardware compability guides for the distros of intrest to you.

 

[decode]

Unless I am mistaken, there is no support for SATA in the 2.4 kernel. There is support in 2.6, but it is still pretty rough for a lot of chipsets. Does anyone have experience using SATA drives with Linux?

 

[HappyCracker]

gentoo anyone? Their forum support is amazing. I've never had any problems with software in Gentoo. Yeah it's a bit more work to install (it's not all point and click) but you learn a lot more in the process

 

[Flatline]

My 10,000 RPM SATA drive currently has Debian installed on it, so I assume that SATA works just fine under 'nix.

 

[Haden]

Originally posted by: decode
Unless I am mistaken, there is no support for SATA in the 2.4 kernel. There is support in 2.6, but it is still pretty rough for a lot of chipsets. Does anyone have experience using SATA drives with Linux?

I've got major problems with via_sata and 2.4.22 (-ac patch) (oops now and then), however with 2.6.0-test10 it works nice.

 

[easternerd]

I use redhat 9.0 and
knoppix bootable... u dont even need to install it..
if you have sufficient ram u can use it to run forensic investigations

 

[MasterSamwise]

MandrakeMove ... Impressions

Here are some of my thoughts..

 

[rANGER11]

definatly gentoo, all the distro's out there will work and they all have their small indefferences but with gentoo you are getting incredible support via the forums, and everything is compiled exactly for your system for optimization. Gentoo also makes it pretty easy to get a preemptive kernel up and running which compiles all the required libraries right into binaries which makes load times way faster. The 2.6x kernels have been very good to me as far as stability I have had no problems.

 

[lameaway]

Here's another recommendation for SuSE - of all the desktop RPM-based distros, I think its easily the best. Mandrake 9.1 as an overall product left me a bit disappointed... easy to install, sure, but I just dont like the setup of the packages. I was always fighting it in some way or another, couldn't even get themes to work correctly in Gnome... which is important, because Mandrake is ugly as sin out-of-the-box. The config tools aren't as nice as SuSE's, and I really dislike URPM.YMMV, of course.