Choosing a Linux Distro

[Ric_]

Just come across this link while travelling the web. It asks you a few questions and then recommends a distro.

Apparantly MEPIS is a perfect match for me - never heard of it! At least Debian (my distro of choice) also appeared as a match

[Geoff]

I ran through it for the hell of it. It decided I needed Gentoo or Slackware. Guess what. I'm using Gentoo already.

[StewartKnight]

It said I needed Mandrake, but I tried it & didn't like it. I'm using Fedora at the moment, and that seems to do what I want.

What I do find frustrating is, I'm running it on a 2.8 Cel. and it seems so slow compared to windows, especially switching user. Is this Fedora, or all distros?

[Geoff]

how much ram and what window manager are you using? plus did you enable udma on the hard drive?

[StewartKnight]

512mb ram, using KDE & Gnome. I didn't enable udma on the h/d, is it not enabled by default?

[Geoff]

That should run KDE just fine. (it certainly runs respectably on my Athlon 850mhz with 256mb).

Easiest way to check udma is to ask it. For example here at Carr Hill on the web server:

itan ~ # hdparm -i /dev/hda

/dev/hda:

 Model=GCR-8483B, FwRev=1.05, SerialNo=
 Config={ Fixed Removeable DTR<=5Mbs DTR>10Mbs nonMagnetic }
 RawCHS=0/0/0, TrkSize=0, SectSize=0, ECCbytes=0
 BuffType=unknown, BuffSize=0kB, MaxMultSect=0
 (maybe): CurCHS=0/0/0, CurSects=0, LBA=yes, LBAsects=0
 IORDY=on/off, tPIO={min:120,w/IORDY:120}, tDMA={min:120,rec:120}
 PIO modes:  pio0 pio1 pio2 pio3 pio4
 DMA modes:  sdma0 sdma1 sdma2 mdma0 mdma1 mdma2
 UDMA modes: udma0 udma1 *udma2
 AdvancedPM=no

 * signifies the current active mode

You can clearly see UDMA2 is enabled. As for enabling it, thats distro specific. There's usually a boot service that does it though.

If its not UDMA, the other thing to check is the output from 'top'. Check CPU and memory usage of running processes. Maybe somethings broken and hogging the system resources.

Failing that, maybe its a hardware issue. If your running bleeding edge hardware or using incorrect drivers you will have performance issues.

[mark]

I got Debian, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Fedora, Gentoo and Slackware - they could have made it easier!

[E1uSiV3]

It picked Gentoo and Slack fer me and im a bit of a n00b lol