A few weeks ago I was shopping around for a new Linux distro and after 1.5 years away from the Linux scene I was delighted to see the variety available. For the first week I spent my time at distrowatch.com reading about all of the disrtos and seeing which ones seamed like they were fairly active. While there I also discovered all of the “LiveCD” disrtos. The last time I touched a LiveCD was Knoppix in 2002 and since then the LiveCD market has exploded. I tried them all. MEPIS 4.3, Knoppix 4.x, SLAX (Server and Deskyop) 5.0.7b and 5.1.0, SLAMPP 1.0, SLAMPP-LITE 2.0, PCLinuxOS.92, Linux From Scratch, SuSE Live and a few other less memorable ones.

The contenders are the SLAX distros which look good, have only the features I like, they are fast, they detect most of the hardware in my HP ze4560 laptop (Fedora 5 still cannot figure out my monitor type), the community is very active and there a loads of apps to install. But you know when you have that dream that you find a bag full of (Chips, candy, money, beer, PC2700 Ram) and you wake up and it’s gone. That’s kind of how I feel about LiveCD’s. There are ways to save your configuration of SLAX so when you re-boot but this is not easy or reliable. The other problem I had was trying to get the cd to eject while running SLAX. I tried every hack but got no where. I also did the HD Install of SLAX which the creator recommends not doing for good reason. SLAX is a LiveCD. I found that if you run the SLAX Installer add a new module and then reboot SLAX will fail to start on it’s own. No problem I’ll just throw in the LiveCD but nope even booting from the LiveCD no longer works.One more LiveCD to mention before I go on is SLAMPP. SLAMPP is a SLAX based distro but it is optimized and setup to be a light weight home server. It comes with XAMPP pre-installed and configured as well as xfce for the desktop manager. When I get my server re-built (it was a PIII 600MHZ/396RAM from 1999 and the mother-board died last night) I am going to run SLAMPP on it.Oh well I guess it’s time to get serious and use a real distro like, OpenSuSE or Fedora.

I installed OpenSuSE 10 and was surprised that it found all of my hardware with out any trouble. The GUI installer is very easy use unlike the text-installer in ZENWalk which I still can’t figure out. One thing I found to be common between both LiveCD and HD Install distros is that KDE makes them all almost alike aside from the way packages managed. One problem I found with both SuSE and Fedora was getting multi-media apps to work. With SuSE I found a quick fix “Hacking OpenSuSE” but with Fedora I tried every hack I could find to no avail. On Fedora I installed MPlayer with all of the options and that to work. The bigger issue I found with both FedoraSuSE was that after a few days I found the system getting sluggish. Apps were launching slower, the key board not responding as I typed, the mouse freezing up and general slowness problems. At times it felt like I was using my old PII 300Mhz/96RAM laptop. Both distros developed these symptoms and it is still driving me nuts.

What’s more annoying is I had settled on Fedora Core 5 but like I said it’s running in slow motion so I am now back in the market for a new distro that doesn’t suck.

Update In the past 4 days I have installed and uninstalled: CentOS 4.3, Kbuntu 5.1 and Fedora 4. The problem with CentOS was dependicies when uning ./config & make as well as not being able to find rpm’s. 2 f’in hours to find and install gftp. Kbuntu was just dog slow. The install took forever (it’s a single CD and it took longer than a Fedora DVD). And finnaly with Fedora 4 the Up2Date app kept freezing the whol system requiring a hard-reboot (aka unplug and remove battery). Now here’s the funny part. I am back to using Fedora 5! Why in gods name would I doo that?! It’s got a huge community base, most apps have an rpm for Fedora and if I just put my mind to it I can tweak it to work properly on my laptop. And lastly it just works, almost. It almost just work.