Thursday, May 04, 2006

What Operating System should i Use?

I have a compaq R4000 laptop and currently have windows XP and SuSE 10. I have been having a hard time trying to decide whether i should use SuSE, Ubuntu or Solaris. It would be nice to have some comments on what you prefer and what you like/dislike about the mentioned Os's.

Note: I have to have XP for the little amounts of time when i decide to play halflife 2 or Doom 3.

30 comments:

Anonymous said...

I never used SuSE.. only WindowXP but i used Linux...

i think WinXP is cool... no knowledge with suSE

Anonymous said...

I have never used Solaris or Ubuntu.
Iam a fun of unix/linux but i usually Red hat (Fedora Core). So I would recommend that you use both Xp and Suse.

Otherwise, i have liked the way u started programming at an early age. I am also a software developer in Uganda - East Africa. I use Java, C++, C#, PHP and ASP.NET. I would like to get your email. mine is skatungi@ura.go.ug

Collin said...

Katungi Gordon Stuart thanks for your input...i have been thinking about switching to a different type of linux/unix. My email is rekahsoft@netbeans.org. Thanks for the comment

Claudiu Bulcu said...

The next Ubuntu promises a lot, Collin. It's beta, so keep an eye on it:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DapperDrake

screenshots
http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/dapperbeta

Release date: June 2006

Anonymous said...

hey, in my opinion you sould use any unix/linux distribution like fedore or ubuntu which are very good if youo are new usign linux but anyway you should keep an xp in your notebook cose you never know..microsoft has allways something to trick us in..

Anonymous said...

I have used Ubuntu, Debian, SuSE, RedHat and Windows (in may flavours).. I'm senior engineer developing with NetBeans and my advice for an OS is to "use the right tool for the job". I change my OS for the project I'm working on, it's as simple as that.

For this kind of thing I cannot recommend VMWare highly enough, then you can have your host OS as whatever you want.

Anonymous said...

p.s. you don't need Windows to play HL2 see http://www.codeweavers.com/ and http://www.transgaming.com/news.php?newsid=135

HTH

Collin said...

Thanks for the info rory...i never knew that...do you know if it is possbale for doom 3?

Collin said...

Ubuntu 6 looks very interesting...i may go ahead and use that...i like the improvements to Gnome and i especialy like the wireless support...

Anonymous said...

Ubuntu KDE is looking god too (if you aren't that hot on Gnome (some people aren't)... As for playing games on Linux, you can do LOTS of things on Linux that "the man" would like you to think you can't ;). Have a search for Doom 3, I expect it is supported. Also take a deeper look at Wine.

Collin said...

Yes...Wine is awesome but still it not up to Direct X 9...when it is there i will dump Windows for good (well i am hoping)...i will search for some info about Doom 3 on Linux and post what i find...

Collin said...

Well...that was easy...here is the link...id shows how to patch it :)
http://zerowing.idsoftware.com/linux/doom/Doom3FrontPage#head-a1c2742f76d6b255cfe02858603a00f5772c8b54

btw i think i am going to switch to ubuntu 6.06 dapper beta 2...it looks awesome...i tried the live cd last night...i really like the wireless support and hope that my wireless card will work propoerly...Soon linux will have a standard wifi stack (hopefuly) and wifi will work right outof the box (for more info check: http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS1977847793.html)

Anonymous said...

Hey, I stumbled across your blog from the netbeans interview. Anyways, Ubuntu Dapper Drake is coming out very nicely. I'm currently using Kubuntu(the KDE variant) beta 2. Flight 7 is out now so you might download that instead of beta 2.

Anonymous said...

And by the way, Doom3 runs natively on linux.

Anonymous said...

Good choice. Let me know if you managed to get CVS to work on Ubuntu.

Anonymous said...

Hello! i just read this post. Lol

I've used many Linux distributions and in my point of view, the one i like most is ubuntu.

You should give it a try :) u'll like it :).

Sorry for my bad english.

Anonymous said...

This is really a response to two blogs: first this one. I have a Compaq 1200 presario, 64bit, and I use Gentoo. It's screaming fast, and if you want any software you just type "emerge software". The only downside is that it's hard to get started. The trick is not to panic during the installation, and follow the guide to a T. You'll learn a lot: enough to get you started. www.gentoo.org The second thing is that I read the Netbeans article, and thought, "Oh my god, this is me!" I'm 15, I started programming when I was about 7 (Integer basic, things like print Hello, what is your name etc), and just moved to Java this year. I'm also skipping a year in computer science, going straight to Advanced Placement Computer Science. Have you tried BlueJ? It's an educational compiler, but it's pretty cool.

P.S. My website link is the link of the java project I started recently

Anonymous said...

I don't recomend you to use suse, I See that you like ubuntu, maybe you could try kubuntu. I use it and its very good.

balakumar said...

Better use Ubuntu... it is very good easy to use os and very great for java development environment...

--
Balakumar Muthu
http://i5bala.blogspot.com

Collin said...

Chiapaneko thanks for the comment. I ahve switched to Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Beta 2...it is very nice...i am just having some issues getting NetBEans and jdk 1.5 update 6 to work...i will have it working by the end of the day.

Collin said...

Hey Peter Davoust...it is nice to know there are young developers uot there...i have not tried blueJ but stick to the standard Sun compiler...I ahev a copy of gentoo but have yet to try it...i really like Ubuntu dapper so i'm am going to stick with that for a bit...i will definitly try it though. Pretty cool idea for the software...good luck.

Collin said...

Thanks for the comment Rodrido de almeida. Why do you not recommmed SuSE? Althought i do prefer Ubuntu...i like how light weight Gnome is. Regards.

Anonymous said...

i don't recomend it because is much slower than oders linux distributions, and i like more Debian based distribution :), but it has some good things, for example yast, While its linux and not windows for developing is fine for me ;)

Claudiu Bulcu said...

Collin, have you managed to install java on your Ubuntu?

Anonymous said...

I think that's perfect. I'm working on Netbeans right now :) and it works excellent!.

By the way, do you have any IM account? I use MSN because is one of the most used, my mail is p0well[@t]linuxmail[dot]org
If you want you can add me to your contact list. :)

Have a nice day

Collin said...

I am still having issues installing the jdk on ubuntu...i am also getting a error when it tries to show the login screen...something with Gnome i think...

Anonymous said...

jsdk is avaliable in some ubuntu repositories, but i don't know why they don't work good at all.

So, i downloaded jdk with netbeans together and now it's working excellent.

About the login, what kind of troubles are you having?, is your video card configured well?. I hope i can help you.

Anonymous said...

You should definitely make a deb package from the jdk using java-package which is availiabe in the standard repositories, here's more info: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/RestrictedFormats
Look at the java section

Anonymous said...

I have Kubuntu working with JDK, the only thing i did was to download JDK 1.5 for linux from: http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/download.jsp
Then i installed it in /usr/local as root.
Then i made two links to java and javac. Two in /usr/bin and two in /etc/altenatives. the comands are:

ln -s /usr/local/jdk1.5.0_04/bin/java /usr/bin/java

ln -s /usr/local/jdk1.5.0_04/bin/javac /usr/bin/javac

ln -s /usr/local/jdk1.5.0_04/bin/java /etc/alternatives/javac

ln -s /usr/local/jdk1.5.0_04/bin/javac /etc/alternatives/javac

This works in Kubuntu i think it should work in Ubuntu too.

Collin said...

I just istalled flight 7 of ubuntu dapper and it fixed the problem...it was a bug in ubuntu :) something to do with grub...it was making entries everytime i booted...wierd...anyway i should have the jsk working tonight...thanks for the help :)