Linux Making the switch

Tired of the Microsoft centric world, I'm going back to Linux after being away for a few years. What's a good distro for an AMD 64-bit system? I'm used to RedHat and Mandrake, but understand that there are a few more out there that are 64-bit compatable.

 

AFAIK, Gentoo or Fedora takes advantage of 64 bit. But I would stick to redhat, it has a nice interface.

 

The interface is independant from the distro - iirc RedHat comes with like 5 window managers. Plus the fact that it's rather proprietry now and iirc, there's not a normal RH version (it's only RH enterprise)

As you're already familiar with Linux, you've got a wider range of distros to choose from. Personally I'm liking SuSE a lot atm (using 9.3 pro now on a desktop and my lappy) and there's a 64 bit version. Going for something like Gentoo prolly isn't such a great idea (unless you were fairly proficient in Linux - it can even be a bit of a difficult job installing it with a good amount of nix knowledge).

If you liked Mandrake (it's a pretty good starter distro imho), then there's Mandriva (formerly Mandrake) - might be a good idea.

 

I don't know about 64bit support, but Slackware will always be my favorite. And j4ck, you are correct. Now there is only Fedora and RH Enterprise.

 

I am severely opinionated in this area (as are most linux users), but keep in mind I had 2 slackware servers, a mandrake box, a mandrake "server", and a debian server running very happily, and I got gentoo working once, but my hardware was horrible and I couldn't get the synch rates of my monitor set up for X properly.....

So I've used a few different distros, but the most recent one I've tried is by far my favorite:
Ubuntu

So, I Highly reccomend heading over to http://www.ubuntu.com and giving it a try. If you go to http://shipit.ubuntu.com then you can "order" copies of it on CD. Order is in parentheses because they don't charge, not shipping, not licenses, not anthing. (unless you want support, of course, which costs about $30 a ticket)

I have over 150 copies of ubuntu now that I'm in the process of giving away, and it didn't cost me a dime. (although next month they have a new version coming out)

I'm running ubuntu on my widescreen laptop and posting this over a wireless G network, which for me (a non-linux-guru) is pretty impressive. Plus it is debian based, and if you haven't tried apt-get, you've got to try it. (similar to emerge and 100x better than any RPM manager IMO)

 

Google for slack64 iirc

 

imo, this is the main problem with Linux, there's too many different distros to choose from.

 

I totally agree. I'd say just pick something that sounds interesting to start with. When I started using linux, in my Unix course at college, we used Fedora Core 3. If you're interested in it, I can send you a cd if you can't find ISO's anywhere. So far I've tried knoppix, fedora, mandrake, debian, slackeare, and gentoo. Slackware is my favorite, hands down.

 

Linux is like your first car, you don't know which one to buy, you get lots of opinions, so chosose a random car, then buy other cars in the future.

The exception that Linux is free! Just choose a random one and try others later, and stick with the favourite.

 

Well, I figured that since I'm already familiar with Mandrake & RedHat, I would d-load Fedora Core 4 x86-64... Can you all recommend software for the following uses:

DVD Creation (I use Sony Vegas)
DVD backup (DVD Shrink)
DVD/CD authoring (Nero)

 

install Gentoo but inform the handbook verry wel otherwise you will have big problems during the compiling, gentoo rules!!!!

 

it only becomes even slightly difficult when you start using weird hardware
as long as you have fairly common hardware and can read and type you'll have no problem
personally i like to install it over ssh as you can then just copy and paste commands straight from the guide laziness is awesome

 

Well, I'm running an ECS mobo with audio, video and lan built-in with an amd64-3800. Exotic? Dunno.

 

I've tried Ubuntu, it was pretty nice, tried Redhat, tried Suse, but I gotta say I'm in love with Gentoo. I'm able to completely optimize everything to fit my system, (the desktop in profile) and it works wonderfully!!

However for a person coming back to it I dunno if you wanna go text based install, Suse and Ubuntu have very nice GUI installs, Ubuntu was very nice and auto did my dual boot system with GRUB no corruption at all.

 

newest version of gentoo has a gui installer iirc

edit: http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/releng/installer/
still beta, clearly didnt read that news article properly

 

yup still beta and probably will be for a while
there is a distro that is based on gentoo but uses the anaconda installer but i cant remember the name at the moment

 

iirc correctly there is a program called dvdwrite for authoring dvds? for dvd backup you can use the likes of mencoder (encoder package that comes with mplayer) or transcode

 

http://graveman.tuxfamily.org/index.php?l=e
graveman is a good cd/dvd writing program and may be all you need
there is always the linux version of nero if you want

 

Holy crap... I didn't realize that Nero had a Linux version! I'm so used to software NOT having a Linux port that I assumed Nero didn't either...

 

I wasn't impressed with nero linux for some reason, but I've just been using growisofs for burning DVD ISOs. And to create them, there's a simple script called dvrequant (which requires a lot of extra libraries) It is perfect for grabbing a dual layer DVD and shrinking it down to a single layer DVD, all using open source software.

Since I'm a gnome user currently, I use GnomeBaker for "baking" my CDs/DVDs, but for some reason it doesn't burn DVD ISOs properly, hence the need for the growisofs command.