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09/16/06
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mrpanda
Which distro are you using currently?
09/17/06
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lem
i've been using ubuntu for the past 5 months and quite like it.
09/21/06
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blockhead
Tried ubuntu. While I recommend it for a first linux for others, I could not get it to work like I wanted to. Couldn't get Eterm (and some other programs (forget exactly which)) to compile in it. I never realized how much one can become attached to certain programs until one does without them. For the past three days I've been playing with another distro called Slackware. Serious WTF there, dudes. I begin to suspect that I need to pick a distro based on what packages are in it because once I go outside that, I run into *all* sorts of problems.
edited: Sep 22 2006
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mrpanda
I've been using Slack 10.2 for about 2 years now and I love it. I've heard a lot of people say that it's too difficult for beginners, but i've never found it to be, especially with help from link and link . It's perhaps a little harder to get things configured exactly how you like, seeing as how there's not any built in configuration tools (although kde has an abundance of them which work very well), but once you get everything setup, it's truely your machine more so than any other OS i've had experience with. I usually compile from source with make, but then if that doesn't work, there's always linuxpackages.net where I can usually find what i'm looking for. Needless to say, i'm a Slack evangelist, but if you're looking for something with very little work involved, it might not be for you. Personally, I enjoy the work cause I find it rewarding, but to each their own. The thing about slack is that it makes you do everything and it doesn't hold your hand while you do it. I find this to be a good thing, because it causes you to learn the OS more effectively and gives you total control over (and responsibility for) your actions. For some people though, I can imagine that would be overwhelming, especially with a jump straight from windows.
If you want a system with a lot of packages to choose from though, you should probably look into either fedora or debian. I have a friend who uses Fedora 5 and raves about it, and from what I can tell, it has very good package management. link
Your compile problems are most likely being caused by lack of required libraries though. Look at the readme/install pages and it should tell you precisely what you need. A lot of times you can even deduce what you need by looking at the results of ./configure, althought it's probably just easier to find it in the documentation. If the programs ./configure script crashes though, that's probably the problem. If you download all the necessary things and it *still* won't compile, then try using an older source. For example, if the current is whatever-1.4.tar.gz, try 1.3 or 1.2 because, especially with larger or more popular apps, they tend to be more fully debugged.
Hope that helped some. If you have any more questions or anything, feel free to em mail me.
10/02/06
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blockhead
mrpands, dude! Thanks for the information :D You sound like someone who knows their stuff! I finally settled down with Slackware as my linux. I wanted an older stable distro, once that doesn't get updated every friggen week like my previous distro did. The more sedate pace of the slackware world fits my mood: I can spend less time on that treadmill of updating&updating and more time just using the linux to actually do stuff.
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