17. November 2007 by admin.

To start this off I’d like to mention that I’m not talking about Linux Distros in general but that I am giving my opinion on the top 10 Linux Distros on DistroWatch. I’ll start with the 10th and go to the 1st. You should not that these are my opinions entirely and while they could be used to help decide a Linux Distro for you(If you are not using one already) they were never intended as a review.

Damn Small Linux(DSL)

Damn Small Linux is great. It’s a remarkably tiny Distro (hence the name) that has brought many old Win95 machines back to life that have been sitting in my basement for years. It has good hardware support and a lot of software packed on to that little USB/CD/Floppy. A good Distro all around.

MEPIS

I actually have never used this one (gasp!) as anything other than a name in a list of Linux Distros. Might be worth looking at, might not.

Mandriva 2007

Mandriva seems fine nothing super outstanding if you ask me. Haven’t used it a whole lot though. It’s artwork is fine and leaves a litle to be disired, but then again, for me it is tradition to replace all of the artwork with one of a few sets. I might mention these in another blog post… The installer is nice, you can have it GNOME or KDE(Go KDE!!), free(as in freedom) or non-free.Its a pretty basic installer but I didn’t run into any problems on the computer I put it on. They need, NEED to get OpenOffice writer integrated into the system. It’s there but you can’t find it and the file association isn’t there.The 3D effects are very,very easy to set up if you have a supported Graphics Card (sorry ATI users) and they’re simply addicting, of course Compiz isn’t the most STABLE software around… It has a nice control center, good applications (despite the complete lack of the man command, but you can get that back through the package manager) and an acceptable WiFi manager. Worth a look.

Debian

Sorry, I’ve only used it’s wonderful derivatives, but I can say that I’ve heard it is EXTREMELY stable and that it supports a side variety of hardware architectures. It seems to be more of a meta-distro in that it is very stable, a core Linux distro with out many bells or whistles that is easy to derive from. It’s worth a look, especially if you are a developer or just want to create a Linux distro ( LFS takes forever but could be fun )

Mint

It’s based off of Ubuntu and is in many ways better, and in a few ways worse. It comes with all of the proprietary drivers ready-to-install and has great support for hardware as such. A solid distro with a darker theme than the previous editions. I couldn’t use it for long, because it thought that my laptop was reaching temperatures of 100 degrees Celcius… It truly is worth a look, I liked it.

Sabayon

Based off of Gentoo with a focus on 3D effects. Has both protage and normal package management (although I’m pretty sure it’s RPM a tiny voice in my head thinks it’s DEB, oh well alien can fix those problems…) Its worth a look, the LiveCD I tried came with the Cold War demo on it, and automatically gave me nVidia accelerated Desktop Effects through beryl (the newer version uses Compiz-Fusion, I think). It looks good and I would definitely try it out sometime.

Fedora

Generic, Generic, Generic. There is nothing special about this distro at all. Its stable, and its relatively easy to set up and use. Good for servers and schools. Very conforming to the LSB.

openSuSE

OpenSuSE is something else. I have 10.2 installed on my system, it is innovative, the KDE menu and gnome menus are really one of a kind. KNetworkManager is great and there is no better configuration tool than YaST. The setup takes awhile and the boot time sort of sucks( fixed in 10.3 I hear, which is out ) but it is a spectacular distro from the community. Whatever you Novell haters say, openSuSE will always be one of the best Linux Distros around.

Of course nothing is perfect, openSuSE is hardly conforms to any standard at all. It uses Blowfish for password encryption (which I like but most Distros use MD5) the log files are REALLY weird and there are some other things here and there. It doesn’t have stellar hardware support because the default install is completely free ( as in freedom ) but that is easy to change. The new 10.3 is more conforming than 10.2 as 10.2 was more than 10.1 so there is improvement happening. In 10.3 they have a new one-click-install method that will automatically set up and configure your system with whatever software you can imagine. It has compiz-fusion, the nvidia and ATI drivers, codecs and a whole lot ore. They also completely ditched the ZMD which was painfully slow and was just horrible all around. Its a nice distro that is easy to configure and while due to its lack of conformity couldn’t yet be used as a server is a distro defiantly worth a look. It is good for developers and desktop users alike.

Ubuntu

I just got this GNOME-based distro installed on a friends computer. This is a grandma friendly distro. It could easily be the defeater of Windows excepting of its shortcomings. The distro lacks gcc, there will be no development on this distro without some real effortit has two package managers, Synaptic and “Add or Remove software”. I hate GNOME and they haven’t done as much work on its KDE based official derivative, Kubuntu ans they have Ubuntu. Its worth a look if you want to have a nice casual experience with Linux.

PCLinuxOS (PCLOS)

Is Yet Another Debian Based Distribution (YADBD). I use it on my laptop and it works great. Its PCLinuxOS Control Center gives me a nice warm fuzzy feeling inside. Although not a good as YaST it IS more simple but it also lacks features, like a complete inability to change the bootsplash screen. It is KDE based and uses Synaptic for package management. It has a wide selection of software and the first installation looks nice. It has good startup and shut down speeds ( although not as good as Ubuntu, becasue Ubuntu has 3 system services running and probably halts the system when it shuts down…) and is fine for development. I like it and even though its hardware support leaves a little to be desired its definately a distro worth looking at.

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22. September 2007 by admin.

Hello and welcome to the Free Kernel blog. Here is where we will post random stuff that we find out while giving you updates on our progress. Here are two messages from the staff:

Neural Thread:
Hello, as you may or may not know, I am neural thread the chief programmer here at Free Kernel. I am the site administrator which is far from the developer, that is Swanny. I have been programming since I was young, yes young is relative, and am all for open source. Waldo and I founded Free-Kernel to preserve open source and the computing freedom, regardless of location.

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