Me and My Distros

Hi All,
You may recall from the ol' Freespire Forum days that I had eight different OS on my machine.

Well recent events have encouraged me to pair that number down.

Right now my main OS is Mepis 8.5 - it just works and the community is second to none.
The second OS that I'm tinkering with is Sabayon 5.4 - it takes some work but so far so good.
I also use Tiny Core 3.1 for those times when I just need to quickly check my e-mail (it does boot very quickly).
Of course I still have XP, but that's only for emergency situations.

I still have a few other OS' on my machine: PCLinuxOS 2010 & 2009, Vector, and MEPIS 8.0.
However their future is murky and not getting any brighter; not that there is anything wrong with them, quite the opposite, it's just that I really need an OS that just works with a great community and I've found that in MEPIS 8.5.

Hi Neo---

I know what ya mean....I am pretty much Ubuntu only these days though I like puppy for that quick email check.

knuckle wrote:Hi Neo---

I know what ya mean....I am pretty much Ubuntu only these days though I like puppy for that quick email check.

How fast does Puppy boot, Tiny Core is in the 15 sec range.

But more importantly, how is their community?

The TC community leaves something to be desired.
Don't get me wrong there are some nice helpful people, but I've also encountered several who are not. I've been told to RTFM more than once in response to my requests for help (even from one of their mods).

It's responses like that that make you not want to use a distro, no matter how fast it boots. It kinda makes you just want to wipe it clean off of your hard drive.

On the other hand I can't say enough good things about the forums over at Mepis and PCLiunxOS.

Hi Neo------------


15 is impressive,the pup boots on my machine in about 30 sec.but I am running the Lucid Pup --based off of ubuntu and its a bit more bloated than some of the other versions---of which there are many--Some of which boast a 10 sec boot (which I need to see to believe)as for community I find it as god as any on the web with tutorials,extensive help files and a great wikki.

Sad news, I've had to give up on Sabayon 5.4.
No matter what I tried, I just couldn't get my printer to work, and that was a deal breaker.
They do have friendly and helpful forums.

I'm still amazed at how good, fast and friendly the help is over at the Mepis forums.
A close second is PCLinuxOS.
So far I am having a lot of success with the latest versions of these two distros.

Next time I'm buying an HP.

even turboprint ?I used to search for wrappers and scour hardware sites for drivers but I have gotten to where if a distro wont run a printer through the standard cups setup I download turboprint and be done with it.

I hav e ten distros installed on a HP Pavilion.
I save all my ISO files and often go back to one , after try9ng something new.

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/6501752/gparted.jpeg

Most install on a 7 GB root partition , but one of the partitions I had to enlarge ( sda14 ) in order to install UberStudent which is loaded with apps.
The only distro that I can find that will handle all applications is Linux-Mint 9 .
PeppermintOS loads very fast but has a restricted repository range
I also say that the Mepis forum is very community friendly and some good techs on there. Zoic was on Mepis for a while, but I have lost track of him now.
Sabayon balks badly on my machine.
Debian Squeeze is stable but it does use up a lot of hard drive storage.
I use Ubuntu Maverick for a bootloader , easy to read menu list and can be configured.