[thelist] Re: nice easy Unix distro installation?

[John DeStefano]

I love FreeBSD as well... but they have been slow to add support for
WiFi users, and have had trouble supporting nVidia chipset-based
mainboards (due to the mainboard manufacturers' not wanting to play
nice with others).  Unfortunately, I've got the double-whammy on my
machine at home (desktop with a Wireless-G NIC and an nVidia-based MB).
 If those afflictions don't reflect on your hardware, I would second
David's recommendation for FreeBSD.  The Linux-based OSes are better
out-of-the-box as far as eye candy goes, but once you get to understand
the BSD system, you'll see that that functionality, and much, much
more, is very well supported.

~John

David wrote:
 
I'd recommend FreeBSD [1].  I've found it to be the most approachable 
of the freely available unices.  Installation is straightforward, and 
the ports tree resolves dependencies to in a manner to similar to the 
package based linux distros.

If you're interested in linux, consider having a look at Debian [2].  
I've found it to be the most sustainable linux distro as far as being 
able to do continuous upgrades without backing up and starting over.  
I've also had a better experience with debian's package management 
system (apt) than with SuSE or Mandrake, particularly when running 
combinations of package and source based apps.

An easy way to evaluate Debian is to check out Knoppix [3] or Gnoppix 
[4].  These are live-cd based Debian variants that use the KDE and 
Gnome desktop environments respectively.  You can boot into a live 
system from a cd without touching your hard drive.  You can even 
install from one of these cds and use it as the basis for your Debian 
system.

HTH
--
David

[1] http://www.freebsd.org/
[2] http://www.debian.org/
[3] http://www.knoppix.org/
[4] http://www.gnoppix.org/





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