Thread: Linux Choice

Originally Posted by isuzurover

We use debian and xubuntu. Ubuntu is horrible these days imho.

Good to know it's not just me.

Originally Posted by isuzurover

Xls is still better than oo spreadsheet unfortunately.

Absolutely. I still use excel for all my involved calcs. I use OO spreadsheets for all the lower complexity stuff.
I haven't found a use for.xlsx yet. Every "compatibility warning" I get saving as .xls is over the (default) shade of red used to highlight cells. Seriously!

+ 1 for Mint.

Have been running a Mint server (Samba) at home for many months. More stable than any of my previous home Windows servers, even though it's the oldest hardware i have in use.

Cinnamon is pretty good as far as Linux GUIs go. My UI occasionally hangs requiring a reboot, even though the OS still happily hums away serving files underneath the dead UI. It's annoying but I haven't bothered looking into it yet.

I don't run printer drivers on mine, but if you need Canon driver support, send me a PM. I have good contacts with the Canon tech Gurus in Sydney. Used to work with them.

When ubuntu went down hill i switched to elementry. ubuntu based but without the issues.

I should have added we have managed to get both xubuntu and debian to talk nicely to our network printing system here.

Originally Posted by Dougal

At this stage money spent on commercial releases is a tiny fraction of the time spent. Spent 12 hours on Ubuntu and Crunchbang with no usable result.

I would try Fedora next. Cups works for us, some canon and sharp printers.

Edit
Rpm driver will work with fedora

Originally Posted by mjm295

I would try Fedora next. Cups works for us, some canon and sharp printers.

Edit
Rpm driver will work with fedora

I have CentOS here ready for a crack. Just need to order a new hdd. The current one occasionally fails to boot.

So I tried another install on the ~2004 Dell 600m laptop. Now this one has PAE support, but it doesn't show. So all these linux distributions from the last like 3 years throw up their hands in despair thinking I've got a 1994 laptop and refuse to do anything.

Ubuntu current versions have a forcepae command to bypass this hysteria, but Ubuntu isn't usable on that computer.

Any advice? Currently looking at peppermint 3. This computer is basically a backup server. It's not a workstation and doesn't need to print. I do however use an identical machine to drive my little CNC mill. No plans to go to linux on that one yet.

Originally Posted by mjm295

I would try Fedora next. Cups works for us, some canon and sharp printers.

Edit
Rpm driver will work with fedora

Fedora has a HUGE community supporting it, with a new verison released every 6 months or so. That said...I've used Fedora as both server OS (in a business setting, and at home) as well as on laptops/desktops as workstations.

With fedora you've got a lot of different desktop environments (GNOME, KDE, LXDE, XFCE...) so if you're running slightly "older" equipment, you don't have to run the top-end desktops, and you can still get good performance.

It's very closely related to Redhat, which means that if there are "drivers" for your equipment for Redhat, there's normally a way to make it work in Fedora.