My Favorite Linux Desktop Operating Systems
Posted by: Tim Valentine in Software, tags: Centos, Fedora 8, Linux, linux desktop
Linux - The freedom does matter.
Our choices of Linux desktop operating systems have to do with everything from personal needs, technical ability, to our machine hardware. I have always hosted our websites on Linux servers because I learned in this environment, and up until the last few months I’ve done most of my work and play in a Windows PC environment with the aid of great free and open source software like XAMPP and OpenOffice.org for the same reason.
However, after deciding not to upgrade our four small office machines to Windows Vista (only two of which could actually run Vista) and with support running out soon for XP, I started taking the Linux desktop environment more seriously. Once I did, I became fully conscious of the restrictions of one and the freedom of the other, it was only logical to shift my use and support to Linux and the free and open source software communities and their philosophies.
The CentOS 5.1 - Fedora 8 Combo
As a semi advanced Linux user, CentOS and Fedora (both Red Hat based) provided the perfect combination of available automation with the right amount of flexibility. Allowing the freedom of customizing the environment as far as my technical ability would allow.
My initial plan was to run the newer more cutting edge Fedora 8 with its relatively quick release schedule as a Virtual Machine from within a well seasoned CentOS 5.1 along with its long support life. However, I found no means to run Fedora 8 as a VM from within CentOS 5.1 that was practical in my eyes. That is until I discovered VirtualBox after taking an interest in Sun’s new OpenSolaris. VirtualBox supports Fedora 8 and additions (or tools) are available after installing the Fedora 8 guest. Installation went smooth and VirtualBox is by far the best VM software I have used on a linux host.
I ended up installing both CentOS and Fedora 8 side by side and will continue to use the operating systems in this manner until I decide running Fedora 8 as a VM within CentOS 5.1 is going to work for me or not.
By the way, I knew that I wanted consistency with the operating systems on all of our computers. Both CentOS and Fedora installed and updated flawlessly on everything from an eight year old 850 MHz machine, a four year old mid-range machine, to a two year old (built for the future) power house.
CentOS 5.1
Thanks to third party repositories and Yum Utilities like yum-priorities, CentOS, more often thought of as an enterprise class server solution can in fact become a very useful, rock solid (tough I dare say) Desktop OS.
I use this OS as a one-step away from Windows. Installing all the binaries needed to have full multimedia support, including all of the so called bad and ugly plugins, w32Codecs etc.. I also installed mpalyer, mplayer-codecs, mplayer-codecs-extra, wine and of course fuse, fuse-ntfs-3g, dkms, and dkms-fuse. All of these coming from one third party repository listed below.
Resources
* Yum Priorities
http://wiki.centos.org/PackageManagement/Yum/Priorities
* CentOS and Third Party Repositories.
I would recommend installing only one third party repo, that being the rpmforge repository. Give it a priority of 10.
http://wiki.centos.org/Repositories/RPMForge
* Setting up Multimedia Applications on CentOS.
http://wiki.centos.org/TipsAndTricks/MultimediaOnCentOS
* Get CentOS and other news at http://centos.org
* This site offers a great tutorial on CentOS 5.1. Check it out after you have gone over the CentOS Wiki links above.
http://www.howtoforge.com/installation-guide-centos5.1-desktop
Fedora 8
In using this OS I stuck with Fedora’s main goal which is to provide latest in free and open source software. Meaning that I added no propitiatory drivers or extra multimedia codecs. This will give me the chance to gravitate towards the use and support of Linux and the free and open source software communities and their philosophies.
Resources
* This site offers another great tutorial on Fedora 8.
http://www.howtoforge.com/installation-guide-fedora8-desktop
* Get Fedora 8 and other news at http://fedoraproject.org
* Popular Fedora third party repository.
http://rpm.livna.org/rlowiki
Make Linux Desktop Your Own
The links above provide many useful tips. However as you know, you do not need to follow all of these suggestions. You will want to customize your OS to fit your needs. For example, I wanted to build my version with web design in mind. So even though I prefer Gnome Desktop, I installed kdewebdev, kdegraphics and kdeutils (to get my favorite file encryption software ‘KGpg’). I also like Bluefish, a web development editor.
File System Backup
It can take many hours to customize your systems configuration, settings and software. You don’t want to do all this work only to lose it for whatever reason. My choice was partition image backups of only used file system data minimizing backup storage needs. I am now using Ping, which is a very tidy wrapper for Partimage. You can learn more about it at the link below.
Problems & Solutions
As always, your questions and comments are welcome.
Tim Valentine
Access Website Design
AccessWebsiteDesign.com
Articles, Reports & Tips
AccessWebsiteDesign.info
Entries (RSS)