NYCPHP Meetup

[bpang at bpang.com]

I decided to bail on RH because I didn't like the direction things were
going with Fedora.
It's good to know that those who have commented here on using it have had
a positive experience, but the way that RH described it, to me at least,
sold it as potentially unreliable and nothing more than a kicker to get
you to buy enterprise.

I tried Gentoo, but I couldn't get it to install to my satisfaction.
Perhaps I wasn't patient enough for it (so many options and things don't
seem to be autodetected [good?/bad?]), or have I been too pampered by RH's
and Mandrake's nice GUI (or TUI) installers?

My new distro of choice is knoppix (knoppix.net).

It's all on ONE CD, not 7 or 9 or whatever and you can boot from the CD to
a well equipped KDE desktop from which you can test your HW compatibility
before you do a full install. (Admission: I couldn't get it to 100% pick
up the on-board ethernet on a HP laptop I bought, but I took a little leap
of faith and it worked).

What you get with an install is Debian all set up and ready to go with
KDE, OO 1.1, Gimp, etc, etc, etc...

It's taking me a little while to get used to KDE (from GNOME), but you can
put GNOME on if you want.

For updates, use apt-get.
Install more packages? apt-get

Now, just install XAMPP and in under an hour you can have a nice new LAMP
server.

Maybe this isn't bleeding-edge enough for some, like I think Fedora is
supposed to be, but it's easy and it works.


>
> I too am wringing my hands over what to do post-RH9. I wonder:  wouldn't
> it be possible to stay with RH9 indefinitely and keep it up to date using
> one of those tools other than up2date?
>
> Meanwhile I've also looked at some Fedora reviews. Most have been
> positive. That would seem the most logical successor. But I am also
> thinking about giving Mandrake another shot -- I tried 9.x but it had
> just a few too many annoyances that I wasn't able to work out.
>
> Has anyone had experience with Gentoo? It seems intriguing, and they
> certainly seem to think highly of themselves (-: http://www.gentoo.org/
>
> Alas, you never know how it's gonna work out on your machine until you try
> it. Too bad we don't have a couple weeks to spend just playing with
> distros.