[help]get Suse Or Redhat?

I loved customizing and skining my ugly and buggy windows.Now it's time to get rid of windows and choose linux for my OS.I can't decide which is more flexible and available for skining.

#173297

bahh you dont want to use suse or redhat, why not use the best operating system ever, windows 2000 datacenter edition? I hear its realy good for theming.

#173298

hard question... depends on your personal needs.

suse is (maybe) more for the linux beginner.

i have tried both (new 9.1 suse and redhat fedora core 2 test1)

redhat is a test version that has a lot of bugs in my opinion (gnome desktop has often errors)

suse is really good and stable, and if you have an avm fritz!card for dsl or isdn then suse is the only option to get that card working without any (linux)knowledge

both of them are equal to customize. suse maybe a little bit more.

one difference: suse comes only with gnome desktop 2.4 (kde is default @suse ), redhat fedora core 2 test 1 has 2.6 already built in. but you can download the 2.6 for suse easy

#173409

The distro doesn't affect the customizability.

It's all basically the same software (sometimes different versions), so you skin them the same way.

As for a distro to suggest, have you tried out Knoppix? It runs strait from a CD, so no need to install it. It's a great way to try out linux without having to "commit" to anything. http://knoppix.net

If you've already tried out Knoppix and you want to take the plunge, there are a few distros you can try. Although there are "popular" beginner distributions like Fedora, Suse, and Mandrake, I have had nothing but endless problems with them. They are really buggy. (YMMV though).

I usually recommend MEPIS (try the beta, if you're in a risky mood, much more up to date) or MORPHIX. These are LiveCDs as well, but they install to the harddrive very easily via a GUI tool. You only need to know a little bit about partitioning (which we can help you with).

http://mepis.org (it's hard to find the download link, I can help if you're interested)

http://morphix.net

You can also install KNOPPIX to the harddrive, and it runs very nicely. The reason I recommend these three distros is because 1) they're liveCDs, and 2) they're based off of Debian. Debian is really a very nice distro with awesome package management. Once you install it (via the vanilla or these livecds) you never have to install it again. Apt-Get lets you update your system online. It's usually a lot more stable than Fedora, Mandrake, etc too.

There are other distros that provide similar systems to apt-get, but none of them are as easy to install (Gentoo, Arch, etc).

Have fun! Linux is new and in some cases harder than Windows, but you get stability, flexability, freedom, and endless customizability. Also, UNIX is very simple once you learn the basics.

#173449

Well I have taken a whole different aproach on things. I went to fedora, and tried to dump windows all together, untill I ran in to my daily useabilty problems:

- My $300 external DVD+R became a $300 external CD-ROM because I could not find and DVD copying software. (ie. DVD XCopy)

-All of the $ I spent on games was a big waste. Not to mention my playstation emulator.

- My Sony Handycam was a paperweight, and all I could use was the memstick to copy pics from.

- I had partial use of my Nomad Jukebox 3, as compared to using "Notmad Explorer" in windows, and using GNomad in fedora.

- My ISP would not help with any connection issues because they would only support windows.

My first solution was to use vmware to run virtual windows machines to make up for my win32 needs. (wine doesn't work with alot of new programs because of a kernel security patch.) After installing the virtual machines I still had no control of my devices, but I did have certain apps like office xp, and what not. (but even in windows I use OpenOffice.)

So I thought about what it was that I wanted from linux... security, networking power, advanced shell, (ie; command line) and the opritunity to learn a new OS in hopes to break the bondage of bill gates evil empire. But since the $65 billion dollar tycoon has the worl eating out of its hand, and they inturn write software for his OS, it wouldn't be easy.

So I came up with my new solution. I busted out my XP cd and went to work on changing the default directory structure to be more like linux.

- I changed my C:\Windows to C:\i386

- Program Files to C:\opt

- Documents and Settings to c:\home (and my user profile, "/home/neosublime", is also my "Personal" directory)

Then I downloaded a full cygwin setup, and regardless of the warnings, I installed it into the root of my hard drive, and included it into my windows path, (see pic below). I have yet to run into any problems.

Then to top it all off I used vmware to install a few Linux virtual machines, and all win9x releases and used briged networking, so I could access them from my outside network machines on my home lan, and vice versa.

Then for my gui, at first I was emulateing a linux look too, untill I got objectbar, and was able to use a more mac like aproach to my desktop. I like not only the look of the mac interface, but the feel to. So I went to a mac gui.

So in the end I have a fully functional smooth running OS, with the compatabilty and gamming needs of windows. A cygwin backbone, with an advanced shell, full X-server, telnet, ssh client and server, KDE and GNOME for cygwin, and many other linux networking tools that have been ported to cygwin like nmap and so on. And a beautiful gui that thinks it's a Mac.

As far as the skinning in fedora, the posibilties are endless. KDE even has a built in Mac like menu bar that you can use, But if you want a reallly nice mac like gui, you will find that you will be creating alot skins yourself. (I think that http://kde-look.org

has pulled most of there mac stuff down.)

I say, depending on your needs, stick to win for a little while longer, and emulate everything else. Keep a second hard drive or partition to test linux every now and then until there is a distro that can meet all of your needs.