Over the past two months I have tried out various current Live and installed Linux Distros available as DVD and ISO images fron Linux Magizine, various on-line sources, and Linux Format. I had also tried Open Solaris and a couple of BSD based ISOs even though they are not strictly speaking Linux. I tried these as Live media running off the DVD, as virtualized OSs rrunning running in Virtual Box, and as installed systems on the system's harddrive.
I had attempted to use live distros before, but had problems because I really didn't have machines with enough memory to run anything but the smallest distros. Most of the main well-known distros don't run in anything less than a gig of ram. I got a machine with 3 GB in late July and was able to try out the media I had access to.
What is in a Linux Distro is hightly customizable, whether live or not. The live distros need to anticipate the widely different hardware they are going to run on, and since they often share DVD space with other distros and other files, they are often pared down, not necessarily bare bones, but having a selection of what the packager thinks has appeal, and often to a novice audience. One is often going to find that favorite applications are missing. I installed Emacs, my favorite editor from on-line repositories into the ram-disk even though I knew it would go away when I rebooted, but I wanted to see if a package with that much complexity would install, about 60 MB, and was surprized at how fast and easy it was to get. I had to do this with several versions of Ubuntu and other debian deratives I tried. I had a Knoppix 5.3.1 live DVD which had lots of applications, and the newer Knoppix 6 had much less. The latter was a good demo of accessibility with a text to speech feature and a non-X11 front end, both for sight impaired. I am sight impaired, but it was very hard to adjust to text to speech. I could use the older Knoppix as a rescue DVD provided the system had a fair amount of memory. There was one distro I tried called "Rescue CD" that was only about 250 MB that had a thinned down X11, but they managed to squeeze gemacs into something that small. I could use that on the smallest PC around.
Like it or not, even if the price is as right as it has ever been, an inexpensive desktop PC is a good Linux platorm, but often comes preinstalled with some version of Windows, whether XP or Vista. I had never played with Vista so I spent a couple of week playing with it. I let the trial of Norton Firewall determine how long I would expose Vista to the Internet and how long I would have before I would have to decide which Linux to install on the hard-drive. I did add my favorites to Vista, cygwin, and several astronomy progrms. I still have the Vista install, but I don't boot it up very often; I like certian Windows apps better than their Linux equvalents, such as Celestia and Stellarian, the graphics are better.
One of the things I added was Virtual Box from Sun Microsystems, so that I could test virtualized Linices and other OSs. I tried Ubuntu and Mint Linux, and a couple of others. I had also tried Open Solaris from an ISO of it I made and burned to a CDR, which ran live, but would not run under Virtual Box; now you would think that Sun would make sure its own OS would run under its own virtualizer.
When it came to installing a Linux, I gave myself the month or so of free Norton Firewall coverage to decide. My attitude is that a Microsoft OS is not secure on the Internet and it is much perferable to run Linux when Microsoft's strategic plan is to make money for its business partners, e.g. Norton, to provide at an extra cost, something that should be there. Besides, Windows, despite reliability improvements since Windows 2000, should not leave gaping holes in its security so that its business partners can nag you to buy their products.
So, I gave myself that time to get a flavor for Vista and to decide which Linux to install, by that time I was fed up with the nonsense Windows Explorer causes by not moving files and splattering links all over the filesystem. I would more often than not bring up an xterm with cygwin and use the UNIX commands to manage my files. The only good thing about Explorer was that it could show you thunbnails of the file type or of an image. That is at least what Natalus can do on a Linux system. I had then to partition the disk, stealing space from the NTFS filesystem to install a Linux. By that time I knew that most Linuxes could mount, read and write to NTFS, as I had to save some of my notes on the live distros I tried to NTFS and be sure it was happy, afterward.
Linux installs don't always go off without a hitch, although they are getting much easier than they used to be. I decided to try for one of the larger distros since it was easier to use a larger partition, first. So I installed Fedora, which went well. I had forgotten a decision made by Red Hat to avoid potential licensing liability with codacs for what it called "encumbered" file types incuding MIDI and MP3 as well as video formats. So Fedora gives you lots of biolerplate explaining its position and refuses to try to install codecs. I was hightly annoyed with this and so wrote the Linux I am using, Ubuntu 8.10, into the partition. When it came to deal with the codecs, as I wanted to play MIDI files and use Music Software that writes MIDI, Ubuntu was much more reasonable about the problem. Like Fedora it did not install the codecs, but it explained that as long as you wern't using them for profit, it would let you. My guess is the Red Hat is aimed at corporate environments where legal liability is much more of an issue, and so they CYA. The only problem is that Fedora is supposed to be open source and not Red Hat Enterprise and so it shouldent contain obsticles. I think Fedora violates the spirit of open source, and so should not be represented as open source.
Still it can be tricky to get a recent Linux with desired packages available. If the distro is bleeding edge, it may not have much of a selection available, or things may still break. Linices are available when they are still in Alpha test mode, with lots of bugs. There is nothing wrong with this if you want to be a tester and have lots of disk to experiment with, but I wanted a fairly current yet stable release. For that reason I settled on Ubuntu 8.10, which is almost a year old, and not the latest release, but it has lots of packages and so far as I can tell works reliabily. One disappointment is that I saw a package on Fedora for making music scores that is not available on Ubuntu, even though i couldn't play Midi there, I can't install the package, Frescabaldi, here, so far as I know.
Ubuntu is based on Debian, and so there is the pobability that debian packages will install here. I aslo came across an installer for Red Hat packages (*.rpm) for this OS, and so there is even the possibility that I could install a fedora package here. This is risky, I think, because of depandancies that may not resolve. I have installed many Ubuntu packages, and even had a couple fail, but most do install. Trying debian and Red Hat packages with surly be riskier.
I do have a Debian install here on another partition, but it failed after installing the base, which is basically a command-line system with no X11. When Ubuntu installed grub on the disk master boot record, it knew about the Debian partition, which is smallish, and made a loader entry for it. I know that Debian comes in chunks, and I could install several chunks of it from the command line, but I havent attempted that yet. If I need to I will steal more space from the Vista partition. At least vista will run its disk defragmnter automatically, and make the parition safe to pillage space from.
Even though I settled on Ubuntu 8.10 and the install went well, and I was able to find lots of packages and on the software repositories it has easy access to, I noticed that despite installing from a DVD that after it did its install it spent several times the amount of time it took to remove lots and lots of language related stuff for nearly every every nationality on earth, and although the files it had to remove were generally very small, there were many files. Clearly this is another example of differing priorities of even the most popular and available distros. For Ubuntu it is internationalization. This is not made clear in the reviews, and although I have no problem with this priority it would have been nice to know how much space in the install was needed for it that wasn't available for more packages. I am recalling that one release of Ubuntu I tried bypassed the locale setting material and because the magazine it was from was printed in the UK it would only allow a UK keymap, and not allow me to change to US. Several of the important characters for the shell were mapped to different characters like the symbol for the English Pound.
My housemate, a Mac guy was amused that I was trying out Linux Distros, afterall he only has to deal with the latest and greatest Mac OS X on the newish iMac desktop he has. I only could afford a Power PC Mac Mini in 2005 which is now obsolete. I have been able to get the latest updates for that when ever Apple provides them. They are pretty good about keeping the system secured and reasonably current, but the Mini will not run Mac OS x 10.5 and there are increasingly fewer apps on the Apple site that still run on Power PC. I am not mad at Steve Jobs for getting mad at IBM over the Power Pc and going to Intel. It was the right move. He couldn't get a faster processor that would run cooler, but if Apple eventually stopps supporting my machine, some Linux will be there, Yellow Dog, or something else to run on it, and Linux can already read HFS just like it can read NTFS. Maybe I will be able to move the stuff off my main disk on the Mini to a firewire or USB disk and run Linux
But when the decision came as to how to expand, my labtop battery had just failed, and I learned that for twice what Toshiba wanted to replace the battery, I could buy an entire desktop system, so I did. It was half as much as the cheapest possible Mac and I had lots of ram, a 19" flat panel, and although the disk was smaller than usual, it was enough. So, the trade off on price meant more choices as to OS and that is why I took my time. I am reasonably happy with what I chose, and I can continue to explore.
I had been curious about Slackware for a long time and I did run Slackware 12 on my laptop. It worked fine, but it left lots of the configuration blank. Now there is a live distro based on Slackware that is represented as a rescue DVD. I might get it and test it to see if it is robust like Knoppix and Ubuntu to be used without installing and having to do the configuration work I had to do wiht Slack-12.
With Ubuntu 8.10 being my base Linux install, I proceeded to add many packages from the software repositories with emphesis on development environments for computer languages and web content. These areas are related as good IDEs for them share common features, such as token matching and code completion. I have been trying out many HTML/XML and programming IDEs notably NetBeans and its competition, Eclipse, and some others.
In the backdrop to questions relating to HTML and XML document editors is the pobbibility that I will simply fall back to Emacs, or "Good 'Ol Emacs", which as a portable solution always wins, but an important issue is color choosing for styles. The HTML editors, even those that do not display WYSIWYG, at least have some color wheel feature so you are not forced to edit RGB hexidecimal values. Beyond that pure ease of use is a big factor. For this reason my tastes have tended toward Bluefish as my editor of choice, with emacs as the backup. I am sure that a minor mode for HTML in the latter will do very good sainity testing, and more so for XML.
Here the issue is different. The downfall of every object-orieted language is the complexity of its class libraries, meaning that finding class prototypes is always the greatest challenge. Ordinary editors, even those intended for programmers with syntax highlighting do little to help the programmer to navigate through the moras of elements in the language or its class libraries.
In particular I was very interested in NetBeans because I had balked at becomming a Java expert to support this IDE when it was under development at Sun Microsystems, whaen I worked there in 2004. The reason has to do with the complexity of the class libraries and the fact that Java and the IDE were not accessable to a low vision user. Since then I had heard a low wision programmer assert flat out that this is true.
Anyway, I wanted to revisit the issue and installed NetBeans 6.1. Now, a newer Rev. claims to support code completion, and I was pleasently surprized to find that NetBeans does give you method prototypes as you type java, so at least part of my concerns are answered. There was another problem, though. In order to provide a palate for positioning GUI objects for applets, NetBeans hides the linkages between Swing objects and your code. I couldn't reliably create bindings with the palate and objects I could construct because I could not debug hidden code created by the palate GUI.
Even though I still have the NetBeans install, I went on to try Eclipse and a couple of other IDEs. Eclipse seems to use a different set of Java libraries, prehaps I was hoping for simplification of the mess Sun has created, but like it or not that is a de facto standard, and Eclipse seems to make it harder to install Java libraries and use them. I could not get their AWT installed, nor explore its methods. Other editors and IDEs such as Kdevelop seem to be less mature and getting method prototypes seems to be down the list of features for many of these. So, I regard the critical issue for these IDEs in dealing with OOD to be not met by these. I have yet to really evaluate the IDEs I have installed for Perl (Komoto Edit) and for Python to see if they real reveal classes and their methods. In the case of Active State, I'd probably have to buy the Komoto IDE to really get that for perl. So I am hoping that the Open Source IDEs for perl do what I want.
As an addendum to the above, the following are links to text files converted to web pages documenting my experiences with the distros as I tried them out.