philcrissman.com

Not too much to write on today, so I’ll muse on Linux.

I pretty much take it for granted now that I’ll run Linux as my primary OS — at least, until I decide to buy a Macintosh, at which point I still expect to have a Linux machine or two in use pretty much constantly around the house. It’s not to prove a point, or because I’m anti-Microsoft (I’m actually writing this from Windows, for once); I’ve just gotten so used to using it, learned so much about it, and more or less come to depend on a lot of the software that runs on Linux.

I’ve grown attached to my bash prompt, and frequently get frustrated in the Windows command environment, doing things like typing “ls” by accident (I do that nearly every time). I prefer GNOME over the Windows GUI by several hundred percent, and not only because of the themeability and customization available — though that’s nice, too. (I know you can “theme” Windows XP as well — but the Windows theming tools (ThemeXP, et al) are resource hogs, and most of the themes are just plain ugly (IMHO, sorry if you differ).)

But this is not a Linux marketing piece; it’s more of a lament. For someone who considers Linux his primary desktop environment, I’m in a strange place.

I’m between distros.

I just decided to go back to Gentoo, after having used Arch for a few months. As I said, there was absolutely nothing wrong with Arch, I’m just extremely well versed in maintaining Gentoo, and I was missing the familiar environment. After it was installed, I met with a few configuration problems and recalled that Gentoo was not necessarily perfect (though it’s close, IMHO), so I decided I might test out the current version of a few other distros.

I downloaded Fedora Core 4 last night, and went ahead to install it. I got as far as having formatted the necessary partitions when it turned out that the disk images were corrupt (darn you, bittorrent) and the OS wouldn’t finish installing. Drat.

Unfortunately, by this time it was about midnight, and because my bootloader was wiped away, I couldn’t even boot into Windows, even though the NTFS partition was untouched.

Fortunately, I still had my Arch 0.7.1 cd around — Arch takes only about 20 minutes to install, so I quickly installed it again, if for no other reason than to get a working bootloader so I could log into Windows and get online, do homework, etc, until I settled on a new distro.

I could try to re-download the Fedora ISOs, and I may, but I think I’ll move on. I may test CentOS (a Red Hat Enterprise clone), as mrben of the marvelous Jedimoose suggested. I may also test Suse again, though I don’t think Novell has released a new version since the last time I tried it about a year ago — so that might be a waste of time.

I think I might try Slackware.

Slackware is one of the few of the “big” name distributions that I’ve never tried, not even once. When I was a beginner I was too intimidated by it, and when I knew more I was too busy using Gentoo, and occasionally Debian.

I may have talked myself into it; I will try Slackware next, and see where that goes.

Unless, of course, I am too lazy, and I just install xorg on Arch again, and use that for a few more months….