Favorite Dist (was Silent list?)

[Kurt Granroth]

On Wednesday 14 September 2005 09:46 am Simon Chatfield kindly wrote:
>  I have run several flavors of linux over the years, but lately
> I'm just a fan of having things work and not having to
> fiddle with them. :)

I hear that!  Back in the day, I used to spend hours getting things setup just 
because, well, it was fun.  There was nothing quite like building your own 
Linux distribution from scratch back in the 1.x days.

As the years have gone by, though, I've found myself more and more interesting 
in systems that Just Worked.  I eventually went to the extreme of getting 
Macs for most of my day-to-day at-home computing needs ... but I still have a 
few Linux systems and they are all running SuSE now.

SuSE 9.3 is pretty amazing for a lot of things that used to be a major pain to 
do.  For instance, I have a Mac formatted external firewire drive (as I said, 
we're a mostly Mac household now) that I wanted to hook up to my server 
machine.  Considering the fact that Macs have a different partition scheme 
(not recognized by fdisk) and use hfsplus (not even remotely a native fs in 
Linux), I was digging in for a fight.  But my concern was baseless.  I 
plugged in it and within a few seconds, SuSE recognized the drive, discovered 
that it's a Mac drive, loaded the appropriate drivers and mounted all the 
drives in /media.  Very nice!

Now I do use Gentoo at work and that keeps me in touch with my geek nature but 
since I'm already in geek mode at work, I don't mind having to groove in 
config files.  You can bet that I won't be hooking up any Mac formatted 
firewire drives to my Gentoo system without hours to spare, though :-)

Kurt