Checking out some other distros
July 09, 2006
I had tried SUSE Linux, various BSDies and other exotic operating systems like Solaris and Inferno before, but as far as Linux is concerned, I mostly stayed with SUSE Linux where possible. Of course, I already used other distros before, like RHEL on the GWD HPC cluster, or debian-sparc and Aurora on SPARC. Now that I wanted to try something different than SUSE Linux for x86, here are my experiences with two new distros, Fedora Core (FC5 at the time) and Debian (3.1r2).
From what I have heard, FC's graphical parts (i.e. when installed) are said to be faster than SUSE's. I can definitely confirm this, as already the bootloader and the installation procedure have an incomparable (vastly) faster startup time. VMware's BusLogic adapter (a configuration error of mine) was not directly found during hardware probing, but the LSI one was detected, so I went with that since it is anyway VMware default. When it comes to partitioning, I was quite upset to find that only ext2,ext3 and vfat were offered as filesystems. Minus points. (BTW. So how did I get to use xfs on Aurora? -- By formatting the partitions beforehand using different distros' installers or the shell provided on another tty.) Reiserfs is not available at all, not even in the shell on tty2.
What's more, FC's partitioner always forces the root filesystem to be the first partition, while having the swap area at the front of the disk is way more useful (transfer rates are higher at the center of the hard disk). The package selection is nicely ordered, but it lacks a meter for remaining disk space. And indeed, the lack of disk space aborted the whole process without giving me a chance to deselect some more packages.
Now that I reinstalled using a larger virtual disk, the install succeeded and eventually, I was presented with a login prompt. Like expected, starting GNOME is way faster than on SUSE. WWWWW (Which is What Was Wanted -- an alternative to QED). One thing that remains slow as usual is Firefox, making a lot of disk IO when it is started for the first time, but that seems to be a FF problem not an FC one.
Simulatenously, while FC was installing, I tried Debian 3.1r2. I had installed it on SPARC before, so I knew what to expect: a painfully slow menu navigation like it usually is only the case with 9600 bps serial. Not so. The installer uses vgacon on x86, and above all, a seemingly stupid redrawing mechanism that redraws the whole screen byte per byte at a time. What I deem bad is that Debian still uses devfs. Well, at least it supports XFS and does not override the user's wishes wrt. partitioning order. But there is no package selection (at least not now and if there was, it is not easily visible). And when it comes to the bootloader, it wants to install GRUB into the PBR - which is not possible for XFS (though; it does warn about that). This now left me with an unbootable system, and no easy way to post-install GRUB, since neither lilo nor grub were installed in the target system, and selecting it in the CDROM installer wants to repartition the disk. Eventually, I managed to fix it, but it ain't pretty.
Looks like we've got a clear winner. I think FC will be on my side for some time!
