OESF Portables Forum

Everything Else => Zaurus - Everything Development => Distros, Development, and Model Specific Forums => Archived Forums => Qt/Qtopia => Topic started by: slapout on March 22, 2005, 05:04:42 pm

Title: Best Distro For Z Dev?
Post by: slapout on March 22, 2005, 05:04:42 pm

My Redhat 9 disk 2 broke the other day. (I was using a version that came with a book.) Anyway, I've decided to check out some other distros. I'd tried a couple of times in the past to get a Zaurus Dev environment step up, but could never get it to work. So my question is, what's the best distro as far as Zaurus Development goes? I'm not that great at Linux. I dual boot and play with it some.

Title: Best Distro For Z Dev?
Post by: lpotter on March 22, 2005, 05:24:44 pm

Quote

My Redhat 9 disk 2 broke the other day. (I was using a version that came with a book.) Anyway, I've decided to check out some other distros. I'd tried a couple of times in the past to get a Zaurus Dev environment step up, but could never get it to work. So my question is, what's the best distro as far as Zaurus Development goes? I'm not that great at Linux. I dual boot and play with it some.
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I think most developers use Debian. You can even install it from the knoppix live cd, if you want -easy and painless.

Title: Best Distro For Z Dev?
Post by: slapout on March 23, 2005, 10:46:35 am

Quote

[I think most developers use Debian. You can even install it from the knoppix live cd, if you want -easy and painless.
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I had considered Debian, but I've always heard that it's for advanced linux users.

Title: Best Distro For Z Dev?
Post by: anonuk on March 23, 2005, 03:09:23 pm

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I had considered Debian, but I've always heard that it's for advanced linux users.
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If you are not so advanced, perhaps try Mepis linux, based on debian but really simple to install and use, ive given it to lots of people instead of windows. Its hardware support is great, even automatically configured my builtin intel 200BG laptop wifi chip [a href=\"http://www.mepis.org]http://www.mepis.org[/url].

Its a live cd and very easily installable. I'm running it (Version 3.3) on two desktops and three laptops at the moment and finding it very well configured and reliable. Plus it's debian so you can apt-get with synaptic (graphical package manager for installing packages from the debian repositories) which helps to keep your system continually up to date with a couple of clicks.

I was quite 'scared' of trying debian, but since i switched , i haven't looked back to any non-debian based distribution (except occasionally to slackware :-)).

Title: Best Distro For Z Dev?
Post by: kahm on March 23, 2005, 04:10:14 pm

I use Mandrake 10.1. The Z toolchain installs flawlessly from the Redhat RPMs recommended on the compiler installation howto here on OESF.org. I've also got the non-embedded QT3 environment set up at the same time - It's a standard Mandrake package and all dependencies get installed with a single urpmi command. (Mandrakes package manager. It takes 2 commands if you haven't set up a download source yet...)

Mandrake is also easy to install, and is a very modern distribution with good hardware support.

Title: Best Distro For Z Dev?
Post by: slapout on April 02, 2005, 01:18:20 am

Thanks everyone for the input. MEPIS looks pretty interesting. Especially after reading the article here http://plugintolinux.ca/simplymepis_review.html (http://plugintolinux.ca/simplymepis_review.html)

I need to go into a quick rant here. This isn't against MEPIS, but Linux in general. Why is it that when they send you to a download page, you get a file listing with no indication of what file(s) to download? (Like this: http://ftp.ussg.iu.edu/linux/mepis/ (http://ftp.ussg.iu.edu/linux/mepis/) )
Ok, rant over.

I did find a copy of SimplyMEPIS (The live CD).


I may try out Mandrake as well. I've got a copy of the Community edition that came with a magazine.

Title: Best Distro For Z Dev?
Post by: Mickeyl on April 02, 2005, 05:07:21 am

Mandrake rocks. All my OE, OZ, Opie development is done using that.

Title: Best Distro For Z Dev?
Post by: Teletubbie on April 02, 2005, 05:42:16 am

Quote

I think most developers use Debian. You can even install it from the knoppix live cd, if you want -easy and painless.

Knoppix != Debian
You will probably get dependencies problems when you use knoppix to upgrade it to debian.
The new Debian Sarge is easy for neewbees and you will get a solid installation.
Cheers,
Sam