If you recall in my earlier post I was in search of a good operating system to replace windows. In these 20 days I tried several versions of Linux.

• SLAX was fantastic distro using Slackware as a source. It uses modules which help you to simplify the installation of programs. live scripts it uses is simply awesome. SLAX is fast and beautiful Linux operating system which fits on small (3.14″) CD-ROM disc. It runs directly from the CD (or USB) without installing. Only reason I couldn’t use it on my machine as my main OS was that it was based on 32bit. So it could just see 2GB of my 4GB of RAM.
• Ubuntu was another distro I played around. The Gnome interface was very spartan and was not much to my liking. The Ubuntu community is very enthusiastic. But the speed of Ubuntu was not upto what I expected.
• Kubuntu is KDE variant of Ubuntu also did not enthuse me a lot. Both these were slower than my expectation.
• Sabayaon Linux is a gentoo based Live DVD. I downloaded newest version 3.4a. it installed fine. A very nice arty interafce, but several programs were broken in the so called stable release. Portato which was used to emerge new packages was broken. I like the interface as well as the speed. I tried installing VMWARE workstation 6.0 on the Sabayon Linux as I wanted to run Windows along with Sabayon. It failed miserably to install despite all the tricks I could get from the Sabayon Forum. It is a worthy Distro but for some broken softwares. As I am writing this I saw new version which is released called 3.4e. I hope that solved these quirks. i gave up after struggling for over 3 days.
• Finally I realized a fantastic distro which serves my purpose in Sidux. It is based on Debian’s unstable branch called ’sid’. It was in 64 bit, it had the latest and most modern softwares, it had a fantstic manual, superb hardware detection and drivers, latest kernel. This finally was the OS of my choice.

I will talk in details about Sidux in my next blog. Until then happy surfing

It has been raining so much out side, I wanted a drastic change of things around me, mainly the stuff on my computer. I was using Vista for a long time (right from the day it went to become RTM Nov 2006). I was getting more and more disillusioned with the way Windows is going. Vista had all the Bells and Whistles Bill Gates boasted of when he introduced Vista to us. But I was not satisfied.

Let me tell you I am an out and out Windows person. I started with windows 3.1, graduated to Windows 95, then to 98 , ME and finally plunged to Windows XP. Later I found that Windows 2003 server was a better workstation than XP and shifted to it. Finally reached Vista. 6 months with Vista was spent mainly for finding right driver and finding application to work in the right way, but the period was not exactly productive. The final nail in the coffin was when I wanted to upgrade to 4GB RAM. Vista with all its boasting on the cutting edge technology could not see all my 4GB RAM. I found out that 32 bit version cannot see all of the 4GB, to get that I have to move to the 64Bit version.

So I started installing Vista and other softwares all over again on 64bit environment. Then came the problem with the compatibility of several of my programs. Many (99.9 %) were 32 bit versions. No good 3rd party firewall available which can work fluently in 64 Bit. 64 bit was looking more like an afterthought of an operating system. 2 days into installing I started getting PFN List corrupt error blue screen of death faults. It was either the hardware or the drivers which were playing with me.

Then it stuck me that in Windows environment I use very few basic Windows oriented tools. If I want to list them they are just a handful. These are the few which I use everyday & I am unable to find exact replacement in other OSes.

• Adobe Photoshop
• Microsoft Accesss
• Proxomitron
• Ultraiso

Other than these four I could get things done with any other OS. So which one of those OS will it be? Let us just explore the choices.(to be continued tomorrow)