comparing suse 10 to fedora core 45 1504

On Fri, 12 May 2006 08:47:17 -0700, ajagwe

Underneath the covers all Linuxes are pretty much the same. They use the same kernel, the same applications, they offer the same desktops. The differences are in the installers, which are very good for both Fedora Core and Suse as well as Mandriva and Ubuntu, the configuration GUIs, what they choose to install by default, and what they do about non-opensource media players and drivers.

Fedora Core is purely open source so you on your own when it comes to binary graphics drivers and media players. That's not as bad as it sounds. There are third party repositories which contain everything you need to install the Nvidia binary drivers and binary media players. All you have to do is add the following to youretc-yum.conf file and you can add thing like Windows Media Player and Nvidia Drivers just as easily as you can add standard FC5 components,

greysector name=GreySectorRPMsforFedoraCore$releasever-$basearch enabled=1

greysector-all name=GreySectorRPMsforallFedoraCorereleases-$basearch enabled=1

I don't use SUSE but it's a well rounded distribution that will do everything that FC5 will do. I don't know if they include binary drivers, chances are they will only integrate those in a paid for version. The same is true for Mandriva, they integrate binary drivers and media players in the paid for versions and make you add them yourself in the free versions.

Ubuntu is a newer distribution that's become very popular. I don't like it because they do some things differently then standard *nixes, but that probably won't matter to you.

The best way to decide which distribution you like is to try several of them, after all they're free. When you parbreastion your disk for the first time create a couple of extra 8G parbreastions to be used by different distros. You should have a commonhome parbreastion which will hold your user data, and a common swap parbreastion, and several parbreastions for which is were the OS goes. When you install the boot loader for the first distro that you put on the machine you should put it in the MBR. When you install additional distros you must put their boot loaders in their root parbreastions (you'll have to select Advanced Options in the FC5 installer menu to do this, don't know about the other distros). You an then modify theetc-grub.conf file of the first distro to chain to the additional ones. If you do this you can have as many distros as you want on the same machine. Play around with them and then make a decision about which one you like best, it's largely a matter of taste. Here is what you have to add toetc-grub.conf to chain to additional distros,

breastle Other rootnoverify (hd0,0) chainloader +1 breastle FC4 rootnoverify (hd0,6) chainloader +1