Distro Install Showdown.
I’ve backed up my system in preparation for blasting it all away and starting over from scratch. I’ll be installing several Linux distributions as a personal experiment, so I figure I’ll share my experience. I’m going to try a few popular distributions: Fedora 8, OpenSuse 10.3, Sabayon 3.5, and Ubuntu 7.10. I’ll rate them on a scale from 1 to 10 on ease of installation, partitioning, and the overall amount of time it takes to install. I’ve built a machine that is fairly Linux friendly because I use FOSS (free and open source software) everyday. The machine’s specs are:
Mainboard: ASUS M2N-E
CPU: Athlon 64 X2 5000+ 3.2Ghz
RAM: 4GB DDR2 804Mhz
GPU: Nvidia 8500 GT
HDD: Western Digital 200GB SATA 3gb/s
I’ll be using the x64 editions of these distros, so if you are using a 32-bit install your experience by differ. You can get each distro for yourself using the following links:
Fedora: click here
Ubuntu: click here
Sabayon: click here
Ease of installation: 5/5 Installation is provided in a fluxbox environment and is rather quick.
Partitioning: 4/5 Kept getting strange errors, wouldn’t delete ext2 partitions. Nice graphical interface.
Installation time: 3/5 1 point deducted for being a huge install, and the end result is a rather bloated Linux install. (Not that that is a terrible thing.) Took about 25 minutes.
Ubuntu:
Ease of installation: 5/5 Just run the install program in the live CD like Sabayon.
Partitioning: 3/5 No errors, some confusion when setting mount points, in a way more text based.
Installation time: 5/5 Fast install! Only took about 10 minutes.
Fedora:
Ease of installation: 5/5 Boots to an installer that looks very much like the default gnome UI for fedora. Very intuitive and clean.
Partitioning: 4/5 Same disc druid as Sabayon.
Installation time: 1/5 Took about an hour. Installs all RPM packages one at a time, very time consuming. RPM would not my my first choice for a package manager.
OpenSUSE:
Ease of installation: 5/5 Very similar to Fedora’s installer.
Partitioning: 2/5 “Uhh… What do I do here?” Not fun.
Installation time: 2/5 A little faster than Fedora.
The winner: Sabayon by a landslide. It was a much easier process from putting the DVD in to booting the distro for the first time. Albeit a slower process it was actually the most intuitive and attractive install media I have used. None of my hardware wasn’t recognized by any of the installs. If you’re looking to build a new Linux box, this is a pretty sweet system.
If you haven’t used Sabayon before, or haven’t heard of it, I suggest you check it out. It’s package manager, ‘portato’ is a little intimidating at first, but it’s easy to learn. If it wasn’t for debian packages being so popular, I would switch from Ubuntu. I guess it would just take more effort to switch than I would like to put out. 