<html><head><style type='text/css'>p { margin: 0; }</style></head><body><div style='font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; color: #000000'>----- Original Message -----<br>From: "David Mccowan" <dmccowan2@gmail.com><br>To: dkwloki-clue@yahoo.com, "CLUE technical discussion" <clue-tech@cluedenver.org><br>Sent: Wednesday, September 15, 2010 11:09:26 AM<br>Subject: Re: [clue-tech] Looking for distro recommendation<br><br>On Wed, Sep 15, 2010 at 3:52 PM, David Williams <dkwloki-clue@yahoo.com> wrote:<br>><br>> Guys,<br>><br>> I am looking for a distro recommendation for a netbook.<br>> I would like a decent desktop, and want to do surfing and a bit of development and network hacking.<br>><br><br>I would suggest Arch Linux,<br>http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_Compared_to_Other_Distributions,<br>it is quite snappy and lean, with decent package management. Arch<br>makes it east to keep the system small, and fast, without having to<br>compile everything.<br><br>I am recent coming back to it after using Debian for a long while<br>because the machine I am currently using is quit low end, but still<br>686 and just switching I have seen a massive speed jump. I know that<br>on the Debian mailing list that comment gets shouted down but for<br>non-64bit x86 they still think compiling to 386 is fine. Arch is<br>quick to set up including the install of packages but they endeavor to<br>patch the source as little as possible, and so configuration is though<br>upstream methods usually config files, (which makes things easy to<br>backup and port to another sys). They do have an /etc/rc.conf that<br>makes editing run levels a snap and the only services turned by<br>default are syslog-ng, the network if configured, netfs if configured,<br>and cron; as such Arch has excellent boot speed without any fine<br>tuning.<br><br>If ease of administration is more your game and you have more up to<br>date hardware, I would suggest Debian,<br>http://www.debian.org/intro/why_debian. Ideally squeeze the current<br>testing, testing itself, or sid. In all three set ups once configured<br>administration is a breeze and for standard tools Debian's defaults<br>are usually just fine if not easy to change via debconf. Since your<br>are use to Ubuntu it would be less of a culture shock than an rpm<br>based distro. If you choose not to auto install recommends and<br>suggested packages it can be kept lean, also I feel that Debian has<br>the best package management despite that many apt like features are<br>standard in other distros now, this is mainly because Debian is quite<br>willing to patch and has excellent policy. This policy does have some<br>down sides for the rate in which packages enter the various Debian<br>level. For example although there packages can be opened with standard<br>unix tool, there are not simple tar.[gz,bz2,xz] files. Reading there<br>package database and installing with dpkg can take a large amount of<br>time on slow hardware. On the other hand you would likely never have<br>to compile anything, which can be good or bad.<br><br>Don't get me wrong, I like both distros, have used them a lot, 5+<br>years for Debian over my 10 years of Linux and around 1.5 years for<br>Arch, although not recent until as of a week. I do plan to try give<br>Gentoo another try some time in the future once I get my tech back up<br>and have a spare system to hose, and maybe also give Crux, Slackware<br>or one of the BSDs a turn.<br><br><br>> I have used Ubuntu, it seems to get slower w/each release, and has endless updates.<br>> I have used CentOS as a desktop and that has been OK, not as rich an environment as Ubuntu.<br>><br><br>Have you considered switching away form a desktop environment and to a<br>plain window manager. This can often cause a surprising change in<br>system responsiveness and with a netbook can be a great way to remove<br>clutter and maximize screen space. I personally use ratpoison,<br>http://www.nongnu.org/ratpoison/,<br>http://freshmeat.net/articles/the-antidesktop but I realise that it<br>may not be for every one. Other choices include jwm,<br>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JWM, and icewm<br>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IceWM. I think both support applets so<br>you can use things like nm-aplet although I am not sure of that<br>Because I don't use them myself.<br>_______________________________________________<br>clue-tech mailing list<br>clue-tech@cluedenver.org<br>http://cluedenver.org/mailman/listinfo/clue-tech<br><br><br>I like Arch Linux too. I plan to be at the Installfest this Saturday if you want/need help installing it. Arch does take more work to set up than Ubuntu because you only get a command line after installation, so the next step is installing X.org and your favorite desktop and apps, but keeping it up to date is easy. It is a rolling distro, so you don't have new releases to deal with twice a year. It is also more bleeding edge than Ubuntu, but I find that it works great.<br></div></body></html>