[NBLUG/talk] Which Distro?

Peter Lutz peter3 at kefir.p-lutz.net
Sat May 12 08:30:22 PDT 2007


Good Morning.

I'm trying to decide between Ubuntu and Debian for a new 
AMD64 X2 Athlon system.  I've gotten Ubuntu installed, but 
it very quickly broke when I tried to change a setting in
Gnome and metacity disappeared.  A kludge fixed it, because
I couldn't find where metacity is supposed to start in the
gdm startup series.  I tried to get a movie player going 
with some success.  I can play give-away DVDs, an old movie,
but new movies give me strange green blocks (with about half
an hour of messing around).  So there are some issues with
Ubuntu, or perhaps 64 bits in general.

I don't get as far with Debian.  A net install does not
produce a working X window system.  That was true for 
Ubuntu also, but the 2.6.20 kernel on Ubuntu patched well
with the nVidia patch for my new 8500GT video card.  This
looks like a problem for Debian, as the kernel sources for
their 2.6.18 kernel don't seem to support a card this new.
Perhaps I'll just need a new kernel entirely.  

The Ubuntu forums are not very high level, but the Debian
mailing lists are a bit difficult to navigate.

I currently have running two headless Ubuntu servers, an
Ubuntu 6.06LTS workstation and a Debian Unstable workstation.
I have used Slackware and Red Hat in the distant past, so 
I'm not new to Linux, just slow.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Peter



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