Ubuntu: Using Localization to Beat Windows?

Even though I use Ubuntu (and it's far from all I use), it's pretty clear that while it is very good, there are no shortage of distributions that are just as good or better.

It all depends on your hardware, your skills and your tasks.

I just rolled out a new desktop (old hardware, new drive, new install), and I used Debian because this particular box responds very well to it, and on marginal hardware Debian and Slackware perform as well as or better than anything in their default configurations.

I also chose Debian Etch (rather than Lenny) because I'm testing the use of a Compact Flash chip (8 GB Transcend Ultra Speed 133x) as the main IDE drive, and I wanted to minimize the number of updates. I've grown quite fond of running Etch and not having 100+ updates per week, which is what Lenny is getting these days.

Ubuntu 8.04 isn't all that great on this 2001-era machine with 256 MB of RAM. It runs, but not as well as 6.06. I could've run Ubuntu 6.06 and had it work fine (it's still one of my favorite Ubuntu releases) but Debian Etch rolls out a desktop environment that works for me and does it quite easily. It did take the better part of the day for all the packages to download (networking in our new building is a bit spotty), but after that all of them were the up to date.

Also, right now Etch will be supported longer than Ubuntu 6.06.

I'd use OpenBSD, but performance on the desktop is nowhere near as good as most Linux distros, it takes more work to build out the desktop environment, and those every-six-month upgrades are fairly painful when compared to almost all Linux distros. I bet upgrading Slackware from 11 to 12 is almost as painful, but I've never done it.

In this case, since the hardware is old, the CPU and graphics chip slow and the RAM limited, that heavily influences my choice of distro for it.

Quoting:How were you doing it before?

Before, since I was usually dual- or triple booting, I'd have one swap partition (hda1) for all the Linux distros, then put one entire distro on each partition, i.e. Debian on hda2, Ubuntu on hda3, etc.

Now, for single-boot systems, I do swap on hda1, then everything but /home on hda2. After that, I create an extended partition and then a secondary partition for /home.

That way I can shrink /home and make as many other secondary partitions as I like.

And since I have swap at the beginning of the drive, I can shrink hda2 and make the extended partition bigger, or vice versa, if I need more space on one or another.

When many Linux distros auto-partition a drive, they tend to put swap in the middle, and that makes it harder to adjust the sizes of the other partitions. That's why I put swap first.

This may not be the best way to do it, but it's been working for me.

I think the new version of OpenBSD (4.4) allows installation on a non-primary partition, in i386 anyway, and that offers a lot more flexibility. I haven't done a dual-boot with OpenBSD in quite awhile, though.

The other thing: if I am dual- or triple-booting, I install GRUB on the Master Boot Record for the first Linux distro on the drive, and for all other Linuxes or BSDs, I install whatever bootloader is available/easiest on their respective root partitions. Then I chainload to them from the main GRUB on the MBR.

That way the various bootloaders configuration files get updated by their respective distros, and I never have problems with the MBR GRUB's menu.lst NOT getting updated by one distro or another.

That said, I'm trying to break the dual-booting habit. It only leads to heartache and woe.