Which *nix? update

[mundens]

Thanks for everyone's suggestions on my previous post.

In the end, as ferrouswheel had an install DVD of the latest 64-bit Ubuntu lying around, I thought "What the hell, I may as well try it out. After all I can always wipe it and install another one if it doesn't work."

After about an hour I was really quite impressed. The "Live" installation booted and ran nicely with full read-write access to all my NTFS formatted hard drives including the two USB ones. I ran up GPartEd, and reduced the windows partition to half the disk purely by dragging the little box on the interface (it only had about 50Gb used on i out of 250Gb, as the other drives have all my media, so it split easily), and then hit the install button and took the guided option that would utilize the un-partitioned drive space.

Other than the installation seeming to seize at about 90%, and then again at 94%, luckily continuing on just before I gave up and rebooted the thing, it installed fine. I think it needs more indication at those points as to what is going on. On booting up the new system, it informed me I could install the proprietary driver for the NVidia chip, which it then happily did & rebooted, automatically selecting what i consider is the best resolution for the 22" monitor. I went and played music and video from my media archive, and the system informed me it needed permission to install codecs, which I duly gave and it duly did. I enabled the enhanced graphics options. I played with slide-showing images, moving windows with playing video in them, and checked out the network connections. Everything worked fine and things like the speed of image loading and the clarity of the videos seemed superior to my XP installation. So far it seems a speed and usability improvement over XP. I am looking forward to playing with it some more!

Booted back into Windows just to make sure everything was still working, and other than Windows complaining that the partition size had changed on it and needing to do a chkdsk to convince itself things were OK, it went fine.

As repton_infinity pointed out that OSX can work on AMD chips, I am keen on playing with that one day as well, and seeing as elfsmentioned it, Gentoo also (not one I'm at all familiar with, I'm afraid, being brought up in Red Hat, Debian, and Suse). I also agree with tcpip & lobelet that for best results around getting the thing similar to my server, Red Hat/Fedora would have been a better choice, but I was seduced by the shiny toys and the ease (especailly as there was a DVD available) of going with Ubuntu. Now, I have all the shinies working, and as lobelet says, I'll have to install the development options on top. I'm thinking I may actually be able to work and play on this system, other than rebooting into XP for some games.

Comments

[repton-infinity.livejournal.com]

full read-write access to all my NTFS

That's more than you can say for OSX :-) Is that using FUSE (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesystem_in_Userspace)?

[rikan-feral.livejournal.com]

OSX's read/write to NTFS exists, but is not very fast.

OSX can run on non-Macs, but drivers can be very difficult to source.