Looking for new distros

[Juan Pablo]

Well, i'm a bit bored with my current distros. Any suggestion?

Already tried Arch, Crux, Edgy Eft, Foresight. Didn't like them. Any advanced rpm distros out there? I have been looking on distrowatch but everything seems like aimed for noobs. Or some info on installing Portage/FreeBSD?

[Dapper Dan]

Hi Juan Pablo!

Sounds like you're in need of a challenge. What is it that you didn't find challenging/interesting about Crux?

[KenJackson]

Well, I'm guessing you consider Mandriva (an advanced rpm distro) to be aimed for noobs because it's polished and has it's line of graphical drak... tools. But just because it's polished doesn't mean it's any less capable. I rarely use those graphical drak tools, preferring to edit my own configuration files in etc.

Also, I am slowly adopting NetBSD as my second preferred OS. It's very much alive and active, in spite of the article a couple months ago that claimed it was dead. And I'm finding Xfce to be very peppy and capable.

One thing that really appeals to me about it is that you can run the same OS on almost any computer hardware that you can lay eyes on. I briefly struggled with the temptation to buy a microVAX on eBay for less than $100--the same model that one of my old companies paid thousands of dollars for new.

What are you looking for, anyway?

[daark.child]

There are lots of OSes out there to try out. Linux distros are obviously quite similar but with very subtle differences, so if you want a real challenge try installing alternative opensource OSes. I would recommend you try the BSDs, Solaris, Haiku, Syllable, etc. I personally tinker with FreeBSD, NetBSD and Solaris which I really like and they are quite similar to Linux in many ways.

[a12ctic]

zenwalk, a great distro, been using it for a while now.

[Juan Pablo]

I would like to try BSDs, especially OpenBSD or FreeBSD but I ran out of primary partitions so I'm limited to Linux right now. Crux was nice but didn't like the way it managed ports.

I am looking for something really different from Slackware, Gentoo, Debian. Arch looked good but pacman seems a bit slow and not very powerful (correct me if wrong)

Mandriva may be a good new distro, any other suggestion? Nothing Debian based please

[genesus]

Elive is really cool and defaults to E17, a really cool xwm. I swear by OpenBSD though.

[Juan Pablo]

Downloaded the first disc from Mandriva, can I use it and then use urpmi to get all the other packages?
You know, booting to the shell and nothing else or do I need to get the four discs (low bandwidth here)?

[bryansmith]

I am looking for something really different from Slackware, Gentoo, Debian. Arch looked good but pacman seems a bit slow and not very powerful (correct me if wrong)

I'm not going to lie and say I'm not biased but you should give pacman and Arch a second go. It seems slow compared to apt but has some features that make it so much better (IMHO).

As was mentioned earlier by Dapper Dan, you appear to be the kind of person that needs a challenge. Well, what about Debian/kFreeBSD? That might be a little obscure but it could be interesting. How about an OpenSolaris build?

You did say you were limited to Linux so those can be for later. So, how about Frugalware? You get a Slackware like system with pacman and a really bleeding edge distro (so you get lots of stuff to fix when those things break ).

Bryan

[Thrillhouse]

Has anybody had success running *BSD on VMware? I'd like to try one of them out but haven't had the time/disk space to put it on my regular machine and VMware hasn't been very kind to me lately. Also, which *BSD would you recommend to a BSD "newbie." Unfortunately, unlike many others on this forum, I have been relatively tethered to the distro I know best: FC5, even though I've tried others. I'm not necessarily wanting to challenge myself but I would like to see what else is out there so if you're a big BSD enthusiast, I'd like to hear why and maybe why it might be useful to me more than Linux would. I basically use the computer for e-mail, internet browsing, instant messaging, some light Java and C++ development and some minor Office applications.