I am bought a couple of Linux distros to install on my desktop. I currently have Fedora Core 4 on it, and use it a decent amount for development. But I have never been completely satisfied with it, mostly due to lack of time to fine-tune it and lack of experience with Linux. I decided to do a fresh install and try out both Fedora Core 6 or Ubuntu Edgy Eft. I played around with Ubunutu using the live CD to get a feel for it, and was amazed that everyting just worked - browsing the web, playing a CD, etc…

I decided I would partition my hard drive and install both, but ran into problems. I had to pick one distro to try first, so I went with Fedora because I was familiar with it. After installing Fedora, I ran into some problems with it recognizing my Ethernet card, something that had happened before with Fedora 4. While I was able to resolve the problem before, I knew it would work out of the box with Ubuntu, so I shut down and installed Ubuntu. I have not used Ubuntu much, but I am impressed with how it just works. I decided to install KDE (I guess turning it into Kubuntu?), and used synaptic to search for "kubuntu-desktop"

Ten minutes later I was logging in with KDE. Next, I needed to install PHP5 and Apache2. Going from
this webpage, I used apt-get for Apache and PHP5 and had a working version. The real test came when I viewed a webpage with the compile info of PHP5. On Fedora Core 4, I was forced to compile PHP5, as the default install lacked a lot of things I needed, like SOAP. PHP5 with Ubuntu has SOAP thankfully, no worrying about compiling PHP again. To be fair, I haven't tested Fedora Core 6, but my initial impression is that Ubuntu is just a lot easier to use for someone with limited Linux skills like myself. I am looking forward to playing around with it some more!

Fedora Core 6 was released the other day and seems like a lot of people are downloading it. At least that is the impression I get, as the fedora site was down for a while and has now been up in an altered state for the last couple of days.

Some cool new things in 6 (like the completely unproductive yet incredibly cool Comipz - see here on Ubuntu), but I’m not sure if I will upgrade just yet. I have to buy a server for my office though, and when that happens, I will purchase the disk. For some reason I find it easier to just buy the CD’s rather than downloading the image. My desktop doesn’t have a DVD player, so I needed CDs the last time. And I feel somewhat good about buying it, since a portion of the money goes to the Linux causes. It ain’t cheap for the companies that provide the bandwidth to download the image.