Recommended Linux Distributions at the Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences
There are now just too many Linux distributions to count. We used to recommend
RedHat to everyone since it was the standard for both desktops and servers.
But other linux distributions look much more inviting now that free support for their legacy 6, 7, 8 and 9 releases is going to
end and you must choose between the free, unsupported Fedora releases and the
pay for support Enterprise versions. Here are some of our favorite distributions
with links to where you can download them (primarily on wuarchive or
my Linux mirror site. Most
distributions must be downloaded as a ISO image to burn onto a CD using Nero
or the freeware burnatonce
on Windows, or cdrecord or K3B on a Linux machine.
- Ubuntu Linux
The latest and hottest Linux distribution in the few years has been
Ubuntu which hails from South Africa. Being an Earth & Planetary Sciences
department we must mention Ubuntu is the only distribution led by an individual
who has actually travelled in outer space, Mark Shuttleworth. Based on Debian,
Ubuntu has grown incredibly quickly in popularity and we found it to be one of
the most stable distros for supporting modern hardware (i.e. the USB mice and
keyboards on our Dell Optiplex systems). It uses gnome by default, but a KDE
version called kubuntu is also available. Plus its versions have cool
names like "Dapper Drake", "Warty Warthog" and "Breezy Badger" which sounds a
lot less geeky than just some numbers with a decimal point.
It has now become my distribution of choice.
- Fedora The free, unsupported and cutting edge Fedora
release
from our RedHat friends is still a very good distribution, although a little
too bleeding edge for every day server use. Still it is fun to tinker with to
see what will be coming up in the next RedHat Enterprise release.
- CentOS is an open distribution based on Red Hat Enterprise
Linux, which provides an enterprise class distribution 100% compatible with the
costly product from Red Hat. It tries to stay current with the latest Red Hat
releases, yet offers free support via their community and web site. It is not
be as cutting edge as many other distros, but makes up for that with more
stability and reliability. A similar open distro compiled from Red Hat
Enterprise source code is Scientific Linux which is maintained by several prominent
scientific institutions.
- Knoppix This nifty LiveCD distribution can also be
installed
to hard disk, but is more fun to just boot Knoppix on some unsuspecting
friend's PC when they are not
looking so you can scare them. Or just to show folks that Linux can run and
look cool on their Windows machines. In fact Knoppix is handy for fixing broken
Windows machines, or retrieving data off their drives when the installed
Windows system itself is dead.
Also try one of the Knoppix Games CD's there on
wuarchive which allows you to test out and play all sorts of nifty
Linux games without even touching your hard drive. This is handy to use with a
visiting, young child who insists on touching your computer. Boot off the CD
and let them play with all the cool games installed on the CD.
Then they cannot mess
up your hard drive at all, and when you shut down and remove the CD everybody
is happy!
Of particular interest in our own department would be one of the GIS related
Knoppix distributions like GIS Knoppix which turns any CD bootable PC into a GIS
station running open source GIS software like GRASS. The full list can be found
at the FrozenTech LiveCD List.
-
MEPIS
Ubuntu is great and everything, but some folks want a distro based in the
good old U. S. of A. The solution is
one nifty distribution, MEPIS, from the lovely locale of Morgantown, West
Virginia. It also builds upon the Debian 4.0 base repository but adds a much
more centralized and intuitive "control center" for installation and setup
system, to make a very versatile desktop or server platform that installs in
minutes, and can be updated with simple Debian "apt-get" commands. If the
system crashes or gets hacked, you reboot with the MEPIS CD, redo the install
and you are back up in
10 minutes. Never worry about annoying spyware or viruses ever again.
- Puppy Linux
Here is another LiveCD, but one
made to take up little disk space and run on old, underpowered systems with
limited RAM. This is a great system to turn an ancient 32MB 100MHZ Pentium-I
sitting in a closet into a real working machine again. Another similarly "lite"
Linux distribution is
Da*n Small Linux.
There is also an Xfce based Ubuntu version called Xubuntu which also works well
on older systems, as well as a lightweight MEPIS version called antix.
- Mandrake/Mandriva The Mandriva folks looked so promising
a few years back, but with so many other offerings, why bother? If you're
going with an RPM based distro just stick with Fedora or CentOS.
- openSUSE Yes,
I know OpenSUSE exists, but who cares? Once they were
acquired by Novell I lost all faith in them. Hey, I used to have to deal
with Netware, and that's enough of Novell for a lifetime.
For more information on the various distributions, you should visit
DistroWatch which
tracks all of the major and not so major distributions as well. Anyone who wants
to borrow a Linux CD to test on their system can stop by my office and I will
gladly give one to them. Yes, mine is the office with the giant penguin on
the wall.
Hugh Chou,
hugh@levee, Room 289, 5-4012
(Add .wustl.edu if e-mailing from off-campus!)
|
|
|
Geobiology