Dizzy Distro Dailies

To continue my story, after I had become a little frustrated with various inconsistencies with Ubuntu, I decided to check out some other choices. It's not that Ubuntu wasn't fixable, it just was going to take some work, and before I invested the time and energy into settling down permanently, I figured I might as well date some other distros to see if there was a better match.

Actually, I first decided to try a fresh install of PC-BSD. I was hoping that a brand new install of PC-BSD would clean up the various annoying problems I was having with my upgraded one. So I downloaded the latest install CD, burned it and tried to get it to boot on my main machine. I tried three different burn speeds, as in the past, the PC-BSD install ISO has been sensitive to that setting. But none of 40x, 16x or 8x would even boot. It go along a bit, but then I would get the "READ_BIG" error I'd seen in prior installation attempts and then it would have problems mounting various bits, finally deciding on a ttys complaint. So that wouldn't do.

So I moved on to Xandros. I used to recommend this distro, as my first experience with it was wonderful - easy install, easy Windows integration and just a nice experience. But my next experience wasn't quite so smooth, but I figured I would try it again. Another Xandros drawback is that the real version isn't free but rather costs anywhere from US$40 to US$80. But I thought that if it actually worked, it would be worth the money.

But, alas, it failed in a similar fashion to PC-BSD, only even earlier in the CD boot process. A couple lines of text, a blank screen, then nothing. And there's even a dozen or so boot options you can pick from, and none of them went any farther. Sigh. Back to the DistroWatch popular list.

Next up was MEPIS (meep-iss?). Finally, a CD installation that went smoothly! A very nice looking Live CD setup, I tried the SimplyMEPIS 6.5RC2, although I had been trying to avoid cutting edge. This looked pretty solid so I went ahead and installed it. I particularly loved how it let me choose where to install GRUB (I chose the root install in my hdc drive). Very nice. Lots of good options and it went on without a scratch. A quick tweak to my BootIT NG installation (I wish it picked up changes automatically like System Commander did), and I was off and running.

I liked the X Config, although it didn't quite work. I was scared off by the warning when I tried to add fglrx option for my ATI card, so I held off a bit. But it didn't seem to install correctly and I couldn't quite get my dual monitor setup working. Nor did it show any of my local Windows, Linux & BSD partitions, although by now I knew the magical command to mount a BSD partition:

$ sudo mount -t ufs -o ufstype=ufs2 -ro/dev/hdg1 /bsd 

You need to tell it what type of UFS it is, as I guess it has a hard time figuring it out. So SimplyMEPIS was a pretty good install, but I wanted more.

Next up was PCLinuxOS. What a very pretty boot up, LiveCD this was! I enjoyed the little bouncy balls. Once again I tempted fate by using the "Test Release 3", but again it was very solid (even if its 'livecd-TR3.iso' name is too generic!). The install went very nicely, including a very nice partition editing program which, if you go into the Expert mode, lets you pick where to install GRUB (again, a very important feature for me).

After installation, it went very well. The control center is nice, the screens are very pretty and it even listed all my local partitions in /etc/fstab. It, of course, didn't have the correct ufstype option for my bsd partitions, but it did know they were UFS, which is cool. But it still didn't do my dual monitor setup "out of the box", so I began my usual xorg.conf tweaking odyssey. Before I got too far, my download of the DVD OpenSUSE finally finished, so I figured I would try one last distro before settling down. More next time...