Which Free Unix do YOU use?

Moonglobe

This is inspired by a comment by goldbug about his server running Gentoo Linux, of which i know nothing. So my question is this: Which free *nix do YOU use? If Linux, Which distro?

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Personally i use Slackware, and have since my friend introduced me to the ways of *nix around v7.1.... unfortunately even Slack 9 doesnt like my shiny new in-built nVidia NIc, so i use WinXP most of the time..... 🙁

LordShryku

I got:
1 Debian Woody box at work.
1 Red Hat 9 box at home.
1 Playstation 2 running a Gentoo offspring
1 Sharp Zaurus running a handheld java Linux OS.

Variety's a spice of life. Red Hat seems to have the best hardware compatability. Debian has the better package management, me thinks. And the other two...well, they're just cool
😃

[edit]Can't believe you left Debian off the list.....blasphemy....[/edit]

Moonglobe

aargh

i knew there was one i forgot. :mad:

o well, too late now.

LordShryku

Actually, I can think of about ten you forgot :p

Moonglobe

hey there's a 10 option limit :p

LordShryku

Woulda been good to see my favorite flavor up there, but aw well 😉

Chaotic_Reality

I use FreeBSD on my laptop as a workstation, and have a lot of FreeBSD shells on different boxes. Have also used OpenBSD.

goldbug

I personally find it odd that Yggdrasil Linux made it on the list, but NetBSD didn't. 🙂

As for my residence:

Web server (dev): FreeBSD
File server: FreeBSD
My workstation: Gentoo Linux & WinXP
Fiancee's workstation: Gentoo Linux & Win2k
Work Laptop: Win2k, Gentoo Linux, FreeBSD, QNX
Home Laptop: OS X (of course)

And coming soon: Freevo/MythTV box, running Gentoo Linux.

LordShryku

QNX!?!?!? Ewwwwwww.... :p

goldbug

Hehe. It's mostly on there for the novelty of it. Probably wouldn't have bothered, but its hard to argue with an OS that takes so little space, and can install itself with minor intervention in less than 5 minutes.

LordShryku

We have it for our Fortna system. It's a cool lil system sometimes, but a huge pain in th a$$ most of the time.

Moonglobe

ya i was thinking of NetBSD being on the list... as for yggdrasil, it was on the top of my head because i had just read about it yesterday.... sorry for all you without representation. hey, ther's space for one more.... maybe a mod could add their favourite?

LordShryku

coughcoughdebiancough

n00854180t

I use Mandrake because I am, for all intents and purposes a Linux n00b. It has pretty good hardware capability otherwise I would try another distro. Plus it was the first one I tried ;p

goldbug

Hey man, nothin' wrong with Mandrake. I'm of the opinion, that the only real difference between the Linux distros, to me, is the amount of maintenance and setup you want to be a part of.
For example: Mandrake/Redhat... the installers are really "complete" and do lots of the mundane details for you, which is nice, as opposed to something like Gentoo (Stage1), where you compile literally everything from source and there's quite a bit of manual configuration involved.

LordShryku

Not to mention, there's also some pretty big filesystem differences. You may partition them all ext2/ext3, but they all put things in different places.

When I first started playing around with all the distros, one of the main attractions(for me) to Debian was the apt-get package manager. Boy, I thought that was slick. Now, it's been ported out to RPM, and you can use apt-get on Red Hat or Mandrake, and probably a couple others. So the thing that really keeps me there(beyond the want to not start from scratch), is the fact that I know the filesystem inside out. No real want to install a different distro and start searching in /var for things that I'm used to being in /etc

n00854180t

I will probably try out some of the different distros when I build my new comp (mmm...new comp, going to be very cool). The main reason I haven't tried any other ones out is because my wife would kill me if I lost all her data ;p

Speaking of new computers...have any of you guys installed a water cooling system in yours?

goldbug

Water cooling.... no.

I don't really have the need for something like that (the need to boost my speed), really. In fact, I've got a 2.4GHz workstation at home.. and I do NOT need all that power in the slightest, but that seems to be around the 'cheapest'/'slowest' option from most computer manufacturers. (Not to mention.. trying to build anything slower myself... it's growing increasingly hard to find parts for anything Socket-370 or older.)

LordShryku

Try Directron. They have some older stuff. And cheap solution there is the 1.7Ghz Celeron. 55 bucks 🙂

n00854180t

I am think of getting a system going. I am going to buy a full tower C3 acrylic case. I don't want to spend a whole lot on a processor (200USD is good) but I would like to get 3.0ghz out of it (thus the water cooling, which will cost 200USD, which would be the equivalent of buying a 3.0ghz p4, but I can also cool the graphics card and hard drive).