Sorry if this has been done a 100 billion trillion * 2 times, BUT! I have some special needs so I feel it necessary I get some real linux users opinions on what I should do. At the moment, I'm REALLY big into programming and 3D modeling. These things are important to me. I've found a couple linux distros that seems to catch my attention. One is Xandros, The higher level business and corporate version catch my attention (Flashy box , Don't blame me im a linux newb), Of coarse im a cheap ******* so I would have to settle for the Desktop base level version seen Here . Second one is LinSpire Five-0, I think it used to be Lindows, I hear they fixed a lot of bugs, so don't judge from former copies. Third is Novell Suse (Out of the question though, its expensive). Forth is Fedora Core 4/5, Open source, free nice, but really, you get what you pay for. I want a extremely simple setup, Mandrake during my first/second/third/forth install gave me a headache and I never got it installed too! Okay so now lets address what I need this to do for me. Support a NAS (Free nas box with upto 4TB of storage some day (500GB at start) Would be nice if it supports install of AutoDesk Inventor 5, if not a direct install, a network install from my windows server. Need to take advantage of my 250GB HDD Networked Good Firewall (I will possibly setup a smoothwall in the future, but for now this would be nice, I do have a hardware firewall on my router, so do I need a software one?) I will test it out on a less power full rig at first, to see if I like it, so good hardware support would be nice. (The test rig is a Pentium CPU (old, 100MHz I assume, 64mb ram, 6gb hdd). Thanks.
So, you're looking for a linux distro that will render you 3D's, act as a NAS (or connect to??), has huge storage space capabilities, is networked (lol, linux = network) and had a good firewall... And run on low hardware? Well, every distro will do But the easy ones are certainly Ubuntu and Fedora... The low hardware requires a non bloated windowsmanager tough... which will be a bit harder to setup maybe... I personally use Gentoo... Not that easy, but not extremely difficult due to portage...
I need it to work with my NAS, Run my 3d rendering programs, ethier off a server or directly from the HDD, dosnt have to have a firewall, but wouldnt hurt. Run on low hardware, dosnt have to run great though.
Oh, access your NAS then really any distro will do... 3D render programs (like Blender) run great from Linux distro's... if you have some time, I suggest experimenting with Gentoo... You'll probably have to install it 5 times over to get it right, but the gentoo handbook gives you all the pointers you need... And you'll learn a lot about it...
Another vote for Gentoo. If it worked properly with my TV card then I'd b running it right now, it really is fantastic. And I love Emerge..
Ubuntu would be my vote from your list, but if you've got some time to play around try straight Debian. You an set it up, mostly, the same but the apt repositories are better maintained. However gnome is pretty heavy going so once x is installed you can add any window manager, flux would be my vote for a light weight effort and it'll fly on even fairly crap hardware.
There's also xubuntu for those of you who want a lighter desktop but an easy install. (Xfce/Ubuntu) I'd say Ubuntu if you are new to linux and don't have the time, or gentoo if you have the time to spend tweaking. (read: the first time I installed gentoo, it took me roughly 10 hours over a weekend, but it ran insanely fast on old/cheap hardware) As of now, Ubuntu 6.06 runs faster on my year-old AMD 64 laptop with 512MB of ram than XP does on my 6 month old Pentium4 desktop with 1GB of ram.
My ubuntu install is running Flux, Gnome was too heavy for this laptop. You can install it with the help of this guide. It's applicable to Breezy, but can probably be easily adapted to Dapper (and other distros).
well if you cant get mandrake to install then your going to have problems with installing gentoo from what i have herd
my vote. this should run on very low speced systems. It runs great on a 1 gig p3 with 512 meg of ram.
oh sorry i read this at some stupid time last night. from what i have herd gentoo is the best. if i had time i would try it out. i hate the time absorbing sponge that people call school
Gentoo isn't that much of a hassle as people think (even the old fashioned way). I install a working gentoo system (without all the customisation) in less then 3hours on my lappy
I'm gonna recommendd Ubuntu as well, after I got EVERYTHING I could ask for working in 4 days, and that's including Guild Wars on an ATi card, the bane of Linux gaming.
