I'm setting up a *nix box for my personal use in gett my code to work cross platform and as a development sandbox. I currently run winXP for my desktops, and have a FreeBSD chugging away on a 450mhz acting as svn server and a few other things. I'm wondering what your opionions are for a good desktop linux/bsd to do the following. -OpenGL -OpenAL -Easy to install/maintain -Distro development that doesn't lag, so new drivers/updates will come out on a semi regular basis. -Runs well on a 1.4ghz (AMD 1600+) w/ 768mb or ram.

Quote:Original post by MustEatYemen
I'm wondering what your opionions are for a good desktop linux/bsd to do the following.
-OpenGL
-OpenAL

They all pretty much do this.

-Easy to install/maintain

From personal experiance I would say any thing that is fedora based or Debian based because of things like yum and apt that will take care of dependincies for you which is the hard part about installing or mainting software.

Quote:
-Distro development that doesn't lag, so new drivers/updates will come out on a semi regular basis.

The ones that I KNOW are like this (there are probally a bunch that update frequently, I am only talking from my experiance): Fedora - every six months there is a big update, Ubuntu - every six months there is a big update, however they update other minor things all the time and both of these have a nice little program that tells you when things have updates (Wait, that might be gnome specific and not distro specific, I can't remember).

Quote:
-Runs well on a 1.4ghz (AMD 1600+) w/ 768mb or ram.

The ones I have listed should run well, in fact most should.

I'm running Fedora Core 4 right now with no problems. I had to install the OpenAL devel to compile with that but it works all right. OpenGL comes with it.
The installation in Fedora is as simple, if not simpler then Windows XP's installer, it properly detected all of my hardware, and installed with a multiboot to my copy of Windows XP.
As Ainokea said, it has regular updates, about six months apart.

I'm pretty sure Fedora would run good on your system. My system is a: 2.16GHz (AMD Athlon XP 3000+ Barton), 1024mb ram, eVGA nVidia Geforce 6600 GT 128mb.

Good luck finding your dream distro.

Hmmm let me clarify about OpenGL, OpenAL. I'm looking for good driver support on a variety of hardware both onboard video (Intel etc), ATI cards, (7200,8900) Nvidia cards (GF4, 6600) and random audio cards.

I'm now pondering it it's worth the time to install multiple distros, and see how that goes.

I keep forgetting about Ubuntu.
I'm going to try Fedora, Ubuntu and Gentoo it looks like. (Gentoo even though it's not *easy*. My dealings w/ FreeBSD's port system and cvsup should give me the general basics to get Gentoo up and going.)

I'll report back in a week or so about how I got with each one.

Oh and why Gentoo, it was suggested 80% of the people I know that run Linux. Everyone else was saying SUSE. Just don't feel like spending $100 on something I'm unsure of.

gentoo is easy to maintain, which is more important than easy to install, which is a lot of people use it(even though it takes damn near forever, that and the fact that optimized binaries are yet to show any significant improvement speedwise).

Your list doesn't really narrow anything down as pretty much all the major distros do what you listed and pretty much all the distros on my Linux distro recommender meet those criteria(except EvilEntity as development for it has died).

I personally use SuSE Linux 9.3 - it's a very good distribution, with a very nice configuration tool. I think it should run fairly well on your computer's specs. It includes OpenGL/OpenAL headers, and is very much up-to-date (except for some packages (Gaim, Blender), which can be found on other sites). It's also fairly easy to install/maintain - it's not a beginner's distro, but it's much easier than, say, Gentoo. There are of course things that Gentoo can do that SuSE cannot (i.e. since SuSE isn't community-based yet (SuSE 10.0 will be), not all the packages are the latest, as I have mentioned), but it's worked very well for me so far.

Drivers, BTW are not made by the distribution-makers - you will find nVidia Linux drivers on the nVidia site, ATi Linux drivers on the ATi site, and drivers for soundcards are usually packaged with ALSA (I think).

A word of caution - if you do choose to use SuSE 9.3, please don't use KDE. I personally don't have much against KDE, but the default KDE configuration in 9.3 is, IMHO, messed up. If you want to spend a whole day re-tweaking KDE though, by all means go ahead [smile].

Cheers!

eedok, from your webform I got.
* Built for newer computers
* Installed with everything
* One that detects your hardware for you
* Packed with many choices for an application
* Full of the latest and greatest features that may take up processing power
* Binary package based
* Free from dependancy hell

Distro name Match %
Ubuntu 8/11: 72%
Mandriva 9/11: 81%
Fedora 9/11: 81%
MEPIS 8/11: 72%
SuSe 9/11: 81%
Debian 9/11: 81%
Knoppix 10/11: 90%
Gentoo 5/11: 45%
Slackware 8/11: 72%
Damn Small 8/11: 72%
Arch 6/11: 54%
Vector 7/11: 63%
Beatrix 8/11: 72%
Ark 9/11: 81%
LFS 4/11: 36%
EvilEntity 6/11: 54%


Not surprised about LFS at all ;)

hrmm odd, for some reason MEPIS scored lower than it should have, should be the same as knoppix with those answers..

I think it's odd that Gentoo got such a low score. I don't use it myself, but the only thing it shouldn't have scored for was Binary Packages. From what I hear, Gentoo portage system is much more effective than RPM-based systems, mainly because of the differences between packagers (i.e. one packager might require 'Magick++', another might require 'ImageMagick-Magick++' (which is what SuSE uses), etc.).

Gentoo is probably the most bleeding-edge Linux distro out there - they always have pretty much the latest software. It takes a long time to install, and can be difficult to maintain, but otherwise it's not a bad distro.

Knoppix, IMHO isn't quite a good distro, even for Live-CDs. For one, the default theme/wallpaper, IMHO doesn't look very 'professional'. Also, it fails to load the emu10k1 module for SB cards (which are arguably or at least were the most popular kind of sound card), which reduces its hardware detection. Even with a compressed filesystem, one CD isn't large enough to hold all the software packages that one could expect from a distro, and it can't be installed anyways.

Cheers!

gentoo misses out on these 3 criteria

* Installed with everything
* One that detects your hardware for you
* Binary package based