Choosing distro

[Arjun Shastry]

Hi,
I have Windows Vista installed and have 40 GB space where i am planning to install Linux. All distros are equivalent but do you recommend any distro from programming point of view? Any distro where following components get installed and not needed to download from internet again?
1) Eclipse- C/C++/Java with documentation
2) LISP
3)Python/PERL
4)Netbeans
5)MySQL/PostGRE
6)Haskell/Erlang

Thanks

[Tim Holloway]

There are no distros that include NetBeans or Haskell/Erlang as part of the distro itself. The Java that comes with Linux is still no replacement for the Sun JDK, so you'd have to download/install that one as well. C++ is generally not installed by default, but many distro installers will allow you to select it when doing the initial install.

Beyond that, any of the major distros should be more or less equivalent. The Red Hat and SuSe distros are better supported by the big corporations such as IBM and Oracle, but for most purposes, that won't matter.

[Peter Johnson]

In general, I never use the Java stuff that comes with any Linux distro - I always download it from the project's web site and install it myself, usually in the /opt directory (after giving myself ownership of that directory). This way I know that I am getting the most recent version of that software.

For the rest, it takes only a few minutes to open the package manager and ask for the additional software. Though knowing which package(s) to select can sometimes be a bear - look for packages designated as "metapackages", they are usually "convenience" packages that exist mainly to list as dependencies all of the individual packages needed to run certain software (such as databases).

[Arjun Shastry]

Thanks.
I am planning to install openSUSE.

[Vinod Vijay]

Arjun Shastry wrote:Thanks.
I am planning to install openSUSE.

Personally speaking, I love Ubuntu very much. I'm too watching this post to get some answer. However I feel that all the distros are more or less equivalent by programming point of view. They do differ in amount of packages they are bundled with the disk and nothing else.

[Arjun Shastry]

I agree. But every distro is made for some purpose i believe.Novell has OpenSUSE studio. Has anybody tried?

[Ireneusz Kordal]

Arjun Shastry wrote:I agree. But every distro is made for some purpose i believe.Novell has OpenSUSE studio. Has anybody tried?

I've used Ubuntu for 4-5 years, but in the last 11.4 version they have replaced gnome with unity - this haven't worked well on my PC (very unstable - hanged and crashed),
and I've decided to switch to another distro.
I've tested OpenSUSE amd64 for a few days, but there have been some problems with internet connection (long connection time), NVidia drivers (hangs) and Oracle 11 XE installation
and finally i've installed Debian Squeeze amd64 and I am very satisfied now.

[Arjun Shastry]

I installed OpenSUSE. I chose entire installation-c/c++/KDE etc . One mistake i did was to choose GRUB bootloader. This bootloader is not showing Windows when laptop starts.
Any idea how to get back Windows now? Bootloader should ask me which OS you want to load?

[Peter Johnson]

Usually a GRUB install will take into account existing OSes and provide links to them. There are numerous resources on the web for configuring GRUB to enable you to select other OSes: grub configure windows. And actually, the latest version of GRUB has a command that scans the disk partitions for OSes and automatically builds the boot menu.

Which brings me to the other possibility: you didn't pay careful attention to the partitioning options and accidentally selected an option that wiped out your Windows partition. That happens all too often, especially if you use one of the preset partitioning options. I always manually set up the partitioning, that way I know what I am getting.

[Vinod Vijay]

Peter Johnson wrote:Usually a GRUB install will take into account existing OSes and provide links to them. There are numerous resources on the web for configuring GRUB to enable you to select other OSes: grub configure windows. And actually, the latest version of GRUB has a command that scans the disk partitions for OSes and automatically builds the boot menu.

Which brings me to the other possibility: you didn't pay careful attention to the partitioning options and accidentally selected an option that wiped out your Windows partition. That happens all too often, especially if you use one of the preset partitioning options. I always manually set up the partitioning, that way I know what I am getting.

I totally agree with Peter. Accidently, you might have deleted some memory allocated to your windows boot option. In my own experience 1 month ago, I accidently deleted one partition which was about 50Mb in size(free space), I thought that this was unused space so I deleted and install Ubuntu to have dual boot with windows vista but later on found that grub was not showing windows during boot as I have deleted windows boot (by mistake unknowlingly that windows would be using this). I too prefer manual installation but with full concentration now.

[Joe San]

Don't go for Ubuntu 11.10. It is the worst ever distro version I've experienced since I've moved from Windows to Ubuntu 3 years ago.

[Joe Ess]

Joe Harry wrote:Don't go for Ubuntu 11.10. It is the worst ever distro version I've experienced since I've moved from Windows to Ubuntu 3 years ago.

Any particular complaints? I'm using it at work for my secondary desktop and haven't had any problems. I'm pretty cool on Unity (I have to search for apps that aren't on the bar? Seriously?) but that's my only issue. I reverted back to Gnome when I first installed it, but figured I'd give Unity a try for a few weeks.

[Peter Johnson]

Joe Harry wrote:Don't go for Ubuntu 11.10. It is the worst ever distro version I've experienced since I've moved from Windows to Ubuntu 3 years ago.

Actually, I kind of like 11.10. Unity in 11.10 works much better than it did in 11.04, and I am somewhat getting used to it. But I just earlier this week installed Cinnamon on one of my Mint 12 VMs and am really liking it, so I am now in the midst of installing Cinnamon on my Ubuntu 11.10 VMs.
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Introducing-Cinnamon-The-GNOME-3-Replacement-244107.shtml

[Joe San]

I often get my Firefox and a couple other programs get crashed. I have to restart my system. I've never faced this with earlier Ubuntu versions. The crash happens as soon as I do something with the Unity desktop. I hope that it gets better with 12.04.

[Joe Ess]

Joe Harry wrote:I often get my Firefox and a couple other programs get crashed.

Have you reported your problem?.
I was one of about a million people who had a problem with Hardy and Intrepid freezing. It turned out to be a problem with the way the kernel reported AGP video options and they way Xorg interpreted them but without detailed bug reports, the Ubuntu team would have never gotten to the bottom of the problem.

[Anayonkar Shivalkar]

Hi,

Apart from Haskell/Erlang, I've installed all other tools. Most of the times, I use Java and Eclipse (sometimes TomCat and NetBeans).

Currently, I'm using Linux Mint and it is pretty stable OS. I've also used Ubuntu for a while, but gave up after Unity. Its nothing bad there (rather, they've made is pretty stable in 11.10 compared to 11.04), but personally, while using Unity, I used to get a feeling that I'm using a mobile phone or tablet with large screen, so I dumped it.

I used to use Fedora in old days, but its pretty heavyweight. Then I migrated to Debian for almost 3 years.

In short:
1) For ultra stability : Debian. But don't expect it to be as friendly as Mint or Ubuntu. User is supposed to have a little idea about Linux and know what he/she is doing. And one more thing : Debian's software repository is 'the' largest among all Linux distros, and Debian itself is available for more processor architectures (I guess 9) than any other distro. So, if you are having that old SUN SPARC machine, no worries
2) For free software aficionados (those who don't accept a single piece of non-free software on their machine) : Fedora. Pretty stable, slightly heavyweight, but very cutting edge. An absolute winner when it comes to stability AND new packages (Debian is more stable, but has a longer release cycle and hence takes little time to get package updates). And yes, Fedora comes absolutely with free software only. So, don't expect to have MP3 codecs out of the box. You'll have to manually install those
3) For newbies : Linux Mint, Ubuntu (pre-Unity versions). Mint is very stable and updated frequently (especially after Mint Julia, it has made its stability admirable). Most of Mint's repositories are from Ubuntu itself. One of the best OS for Windows/Mac immigrants. Almost a no-brainer. Ubuntu is great when it comes to support. So, if you have your own company/project and want to migrate to Linux, by all means, migrate to Ubuntu (of course, if you do have more budget, RedHat is the obvious choice). Unity is really nice - but - only if you are fan of Ubuntu. It's gonna be a pretty learning curve if you come from Windows/Mac and directly start using Unity.
4) For ultra-geeks : Slackware/ArchLinux/Gentoo. Slackware is highly stable, lightweight and, well, not user friendly. Same for ArchLinux (except support community is bigger for Slackware, and ArchLinux is more user friendly). Gentoo Linux is for those who absolutely know what they are doing and how to do 'things'. Because installing Gentoo itself is kinda a 'task'. Gentoo gives user ultimate flexibility by making him/her build everything from source. So all packages/utilities are built-on-your-machine (and hence optimized for your own kernel settings). One of the best distro if you want to build high-performance server (and have enough knowledge).

Ok, that's not short but for normal user, there are two main-streams : Fedora and Debian. Fedora fans may choose Suse, or Fedora itself. Debian fans have choice of Ubuntu, Mint or Debian itself. In the end, everything boils down to comfort level and ease of use.

Hope this helps.