I dont know if I should switch to OpenSuse or stick with ubuntu or go another distro?

[maddbaron]

Here is my problem. I installed ubuntu in june.I dual booted with xp. I liked it except for the wireless driver not working. I have a broadcom. but got that working after many days but then in july root got full and would load after googling and going to various boards i found a solution but that solution also erased all my files.

No biggie installed got new files saved all important files to xp.

then yesterday my xorg messes up while I am trying to make my screen less bright. and more stable like my windows xp screen, for the past month my kubuntu/ubuntu screen has been bouncing and distorting off and on but not in windows. but I found linux more stable than windows...no blue screen of death or anything and hardware friendly.

but after yesterday I am considering trying another distro.

I have media problems in kubuntu/ubuntu...my mplayer doesnt work properly says something like x11 is missing...when i upgrade software in adept i get critical errors even tho the upgrade happens. just a lot of weird things.

But I have found what works for me mainly
Totem-xine or gstreamer
vlc

for media

Amarok
xmms

for music

abiword and open office

and swift/firefox.

k3b/gnomebaker

and wine.

I assume those can be added to any distro...

but my real concern is wireless...which distro works out the box with broadcom internal wifi? I know I will have to resinstall a distro b/c I cant repair my kubuntu in fact what i tried to do I made worse. Thankfully I found a program that lets me read and copy my files so I am going to burn them to dvd.

But I do not know which distro is best? I know opensuse uses rpm's and ubuntu uses .debs

but which distro has the most software? does suse have different desktop environments? which is best for media and has most support overall?

I am going to spend the day copying and burning and researching but I need a good starting point. anyone have any ideas please?

[techieMoe]

but got that working after many days but then in july root got full...

I'm confused by this statement. What were you installing that would use up all the space in your root (/) partition? How large of a partition did you make to begin with?

I assume those can be added to any distro...

Yes, all the apps you listed can be added to any distribution.

But I do not know which distro is best? I know opensuse uses rpm's and ubuntu uses .debs

"Best" is completely subjective. 100 different people will give you just as many answers. What distribution is "best" for you can only be determined by you, and only through trial and error. No one else can really offer any help with that because we don't know what appeals to you.

but which distro has the most software?

Linux shares all its open-source software so really any distribution can run any program. You might have to compile it from scratch, but every distribution is at least capable of running anything out there for another Linux. Perhaps what you meant to ask was "which distro has the most readily-available precompiled packages that I can download and install quickly?" That's also a subjective analysis. Some would say Debian, others Gentoo, still others Fedora Core.

does suse have different desktop environments?

Yes. You can install GNOME, KDE, Fluxbox, Enlightenment, Xfce, FVWM, and dozens of others on SusE as well as any other distribution out there. The main difference between the distributions isn't whether or not the can run different desktops, it's just how easy it might or might not be to install them.

which is best for media and has most support overall?

What do you mean? A desktop environment has nothing to do with whether or not your distribution can support multimedia. The applications and codecs you have installed on your distribution determine that.

I am going to spend the day copying and burning and researching but I need a good starting point. anyone have any ideas please?

DistroWatch. There's a list of the top 100 most popular distributions based on page hits. It's a rough idea of what a lot of people find interesting and you're probably safe installing any of the Top 10. Also, this link might help:

http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/lin...e-posting.html

[maddbaron]

I'm confused by this statement. What were you installing that would use up all the space in your root (/) partition? How large of a partition did you make to begin with?



Yes, all the apps you listed can be added to any distribution.



"Best" is completely subjective. 100 different people will give you just as many answers. What distribution is "best" for you can only be determined by you, and only through trial and error. No one else can really offer any help with that because we don't know what appeals to you.



Linux shares all its open-source software so really any distribution can run any program. You might have to compile it from scratch, but every distribution is at least capable of running anything out there for another Linux. Perhaps what you meant to ask was "which distro has the most readily-available precompiled packages that I can download and install quickly?" That's also a subjective analysis. Some would say Debian, others Gentoo, still others Fedora Core.



Yes. You can install GNOME, KDE, Fluxbox, Enlightenment, Xfce, FVWM, and dozens of others on SusE as well as any other distribution out there. The main difference between the distributions isn't whether or not the can run different desktops, it's just how easy it might or might not be to install them.



What do you mean? A desktop environment has nothing to do with whether or not your distribution can support multimedia. The applications and codecs you have installed on your distribution determine that.



DistroWatch. There's a list of the top 100 most popular distributions based on page hits. It's a rough idea of what a lot of people find interesting and you're probably safe installing any of the Top 10. Also, this link might help:

http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/lin...e-posting.html

I made root 2.45gb's(I just picked that number no reason y)

And yeah which had the most readily recompiled programs...

thanks for help I will check them out

[techieMoe]

I made root 2.45gb's(I just picked that number no reason y)

I would recommend at least 5GB in general, unless you have a separate /home and /root partition, in which case I'd recommend more for /home and less for /root.

[maddbaron]

I would recommend at least 5GB in general, unless you have a separate /home and /root partition, in which case I'd recommend more for /home and less for /root.

yeah i am bad at partitioning not even sure what i need when i first tried ubuntu i kept seeing i needed a "/" "/home" and "/documents" and other things come to find out i only really needed root and home and swap...but now i am not sure, i had more for home last time can they be one in the same?

[techieMoe]

yeah i am bad at partitioning not even sure what i need when i first tried ubuntu i kept seeing i needed a "/" "/home" and "/documents" and other things come to find out i only really needed root and home and swap...but now i am not sure, i had more for home last time can they be one in the same?

You can have /root and /home in the same partition, but SWAP must be its own because it's constantly being wiped (it's essentially like RAM, but on your harddrive).

[maddbaron]

You can have /root and /home in the same partition, but SWAP must be its own because it's constantly being wiped (it's essentially like RAM, but on your harddrive).

ohhhhhh....ok so i am making a 20gig partition...

does it sense to have /root and /home be 15gig's and swap be 5? and leave it at that?

[techieMoe]

ohhhhhh....ok so i am making a 20gig partition...

does it sense to have /root and /home be 15gig's and swap be 5? and leave it at that?

Oh no, you don't need more than about 512MB of space for your SWAP. In Linux your swap space only gets used when you run out of physical RAM, and you really don't want too much of it because its access speeds are much slower than physical RAM and can result in slower system performance.

[maddbaron]

Oh no, you don't need more than about 512MB of space for your SWAP. In Linux your swap space only gets used when you run out of physical RAM, and you really don't want too much of it because its access speeds are much slower than physical RAM and can result in slower system performance.

ohhhhh ok....got it..so out of 20gigs i can say maybe 19 for root and home and just to be safe 1gig for swap? so I only need two partitions? thats awesome! this is looking better and better...i've decided to stay in kubuntu i will just add fluxbox since it looks really nice and seems like it runs quick...i'll miss my kubuntu cusoms but fluxbox just looks nicer and gets rave reviews...

do u know of any other low resource solid use programs? like fluxbox is a lightweight environment, any other non-desktop environment programs that can be considered to be lightweight but high performance?

I need to make a cheat sheet of stuff to add this weekend.

[techieMoe]

ohhhhh ok....got it..so out of 20gigs i can say maybe 19 for root and home and just to be safe 1gig for swap? so I only need two partitions?

Yes, most Linux distributions only need 2 partitions: root and swap. Some will set up a separate /home partition for you in the install. It's not technically necessary but it does give you the ability to reinstall the OS without losing your user data. For me personally that's not all that important because I tend to wipe my Linux drives a lot. I'm constantly trying something new.

do u know of any other low resource solid use programs? like fluxbox is a lightweight environment, any other non-desktop environment programs that can be considered to be lightweight but high performance?

That's kind of a broad question. Anything that doesn't rely on QT or GTK+ (the graphical toolkits for KDE and Gnome, respectively) will be a lot less resource-intensive. Try to find programs that are desktop-agnostic if possible. That will cut down on your overhead.

To give a concrete example: Konqueror is KDE's web and file browser, but it relies on a lot of special KDE daemons and libraries to run. If you're already running KDE and you launch Konqueror you're not using very much extra memory because KDE already has most of the libraries it needs loaded into RAM. If you launch Konqueror from inside Xfce, Gnome, or Fluxbox your system has to take the time and RAM to load all the associated libraries and daemons.

By contrast, applications like Firefox do not rely on the presence of KDE or Gnome to my knowledge, therefore they're a better choice than their Gnome or KDE counterparts (Nautilus/Galeon and Konqueror).