What's YOUR Linux distro (for development)

[dh]

I'm looking for a replacement to Fedora. It has... lost it's mojo so to speak (problems with sound card, console mode broken on my old install, and overall uselessness). I'm looking for a nice, clean distro that has good support without much tweaking (hate tweaking). I'm looking at Debian, and Gentoo, but it's in the air right now.

So I turn to you Mega-Tokians, what is YOUR favourite l33t distro?

Thanks, DH.

[AGI1122]

Ubuntu

[Solar]

Gentoo.

As for "tweaking", well, Linux being what it is, you will always get your fair share of that. Especially drivers will continue to break every now and then, due to that stupid "no stable ABI" policy of them. But in my experience, Gentoo allows you to do the tweaking right where it helps, instead of poking in the dark.

You will have to set up your /etc/make.conf, which is confusing at first, and you'll have to find your way through the manual installation routine. But once you did that, your chances of being satisfied with your setup are good. Gentoo also has excellent support (as in, docs, forum, IRC channel).

If you don't want to twiddle with USE-Flags and are satisfied with mediocre dependency support instead of the best there is (Gentoo Portage), I'd suggest (K)Ubuntu. It will get you started faster, but you lose some of the "no frills" power that comes with Gentoo.

[narc]

gentoo! The first linux distro I've never had any problems with. emerge and portage is an excellent package management system.

[srg_13]

I use Mandriva and Fedora Core 4.

-Stephen

[bluecode]

I'm also using gentoo, which is imho one of the best "distributions" ever. I also had Mandrace and Fedora Core 4 before, but their packaging system plain & simple spoken sucks. Till now I didn't have any problems with the gentoo packaging system.
The major "drawback" is the huge amount of time needed to install/compile gentoo, but this can also be shortened by using stage2 or stage3...

I would really recommend using gentoo *thumbsup*

[dh]

Thanks guys. Gentoo it will be. In a week (or so) i can continue active development .

@Steve the Pirate: *shudder* I've just left Fedora.... PLEASE DON'T REMIND ME OF _THAT_ HORROR

Cheers, DH.

[Pype.Clicker]

kubuntu ... plus i (very) recently starting working with MontaVista Linux Previewkit (professionnal version is $6K per year ) on an embedded StrongArm-based board -- very exciting ...

[Kemp]

Heh, don't get me started on that Pype, our research group has had hell getting embedded versions of linux to work on our ARM boards, forget the particular ones offhand.

[Pype.Clicker]

Heh, don't get me started on that Pype, our research group has had hell getting embedded versions of linux to work on our ARM boards, forget the particular ones offhand.

You mean like getting DHCP+TFTP+NFS up and running ? or patching and reconfiguring a vanilia kernel to make it support those "exotic" machines ?...

Btw, i'm somehow intrigued that all those kubuntu repositories seems to have only i386 or amd64 binaries ... noone ever thought of providing "optimized" i686 binaries (i don't necessarily mean -O3 -sse etc. but has Xorg and my window manager been optimized for a pentium pipeline ? that'd be a bare minimum -- i get the feeling that ubuntu binaries are *way* slower than my old SuSE setup ...)

[Kemp]

I wasn't one of the guys working on it, so I can only repeat what I gathered from them, but as far as I can tell we had problems because the distro we wanted to use said it was compatible with our board but it turned out that it was actually compatible with a slightly different model and they'd just lumped the two together under the assumption it would work. So one of our guys tasked himself with changing the linker (and too a lesser extent patching the kernel itself slightly) to make it work (one of the main problems was a different load address), however the script was such that said change was very hard to make without breaking a million other things. Combine that with quite lacking info from the board manufacturer and you get a very annoying problem.

[Pype.Clicker]

I wasn't one of the guys working on it, so I can only repeat what I gathered from them, but as far as I can tell we had problems because the distro we wanted to use said it was compatible with our board but it turned out that it was actually compatible with a slightly different model and they'd just lumped the two together under the assumption it would work. So one of our guys tasked himself with changing the linker (and too a lesser extent patching the kernel itself slightly) to make it work (one of the main problems was a different load address), however the script was such that said change was very hard to make without breaking a million other things. Combine that with quite lacking info from the board manufacturer and you get a very annoying problem.

sounds terribly familiar if you have a talk with the guys who were actually working on it, i'm interrested in the specific model ... mine is ENP-2611 radisys card with IXP2400 network processor (and i received montavista linux for IXDP2800 )

[goldenaura3]

Howdy.

Even though this doesn't count as Linux, FreeBSD is my favorite system overall. I've always liked the "feel" of it. You've got all the development tools from the start, you've got a well organized system, plus it's stable and quick! Finally, FreeBSD is "your own" system, you get to control each detail.

As far as Linux goes, I've got two favorites.

First, if you just want a quick system to develop on, Ubuntu does a great job. I was amazed at how simple installation and maintainence was.

Next is the infamous Gentoo! I have to say, Gentoo provides a great system overall! It's slim, fast, and let's me pick what I want!

[DennisCGc]

Why do you guys forget totally about Slackware? I do not wish to start a flamewar, but since everyone is saying what Linux distro he or she likes I'm allowed to do as well, no? Slackware is IMO great. It also gives you a feeling you're in control (most things, if not all, can be controlled). And it'll save you the compiling troubles. (yeah, I know you can get Gentoo with pre-compiled packages, but that just blows away the original idea, no?)

But, I'm using NetBSD for quite some time, and I'm starting to like it more than Slackware.

Anyway, it's your choice (but I already see the TS made the choice..)

[Solar]

Why do you guys forget totally about Slackware?

I didn't forget Slackware, I just don't like it.