New Distro?


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Hey, I've been going with Debian almost since I started 2.5 years ago. And OS's based upon it.

 

I have been using Crunchbang for the longest time. But now since it has been discontinued, I am once again floating here.

 

Let me speak my dilemma here.

 

I don't game all that much, but one game I do play is Minecraft. I need the FGLRX drivers to power my AMD Radeon 7850. The open source "radeon" driver seems to give me small preformance. And only Debian Wheezy seems to support it. I read that in Jessie, it breaks. I even tried it myself, and got a blank screen after reset. And also, Ubuntu and it's flavors do not work well with it.

 

So Mint wouldn't be an option either. I tried again and again to get Arch up, but have failed miserably.

 

Should I try OpenSUSE, Fedora, or Gentoo? Or maybe go with Elementary? Or just go somewhere else?

 

I don't like KDE, Unity, or Gnome. I prefer XFCE, Openbox, MATE, or maybe Gnome Fallback.

 

Any help doods?

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I'd say give OpenSUSE a try. The fglrx drivers are tested and work up to 13.2 which is the current version.

I'm also a bit biased for suse based distros since I essentially work exclusively with SLES and SLED at work.

If I'm not mistaken, xfce is included in the opensuse disk and can be set as default from installation. At least it's like that on the SLES install disks.

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I know you have said you have failed with Arch, but really Arch would be great.

 

Fedora and fglrx doesnt tend to play all that well and relies on Gnome 3 Shell too much for you it would seem. OpenSuSE does allow xfce on install, but i dont like the system or YaST. I cant speak for elementary as i have never used it.

 

at which point do your attempts with Arch fail?

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i struggled with arch for a while but once you get it once its easy

 

where you getting stuck?

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I tried installing Archbang, but after installing everytime, I get a blank screen on reboot. I look up these issues, so misleading...

 

I should do it the old fashioned way, but is there some easier way to do this than go through guide after guide? More misleading as the last? Show me that arch page, and I'll kill you.

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I tried installing Archbang, but after installing everytime, I get a blank screen on reboot. I look up these issues, so misleading...

 

I should do it the old fashioned way, but is there some easier way to do this than go through guide after guide? More misleading as the last? Show me that arch page, and I'll kill you.

The guide is very straightforward. What is the specific issue you are having during the install?

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The guide is very straightforward. What is the specific issue you are having during the install?

 

How do you know which guide I'm looking at? I'm not reading the For Beginners guide on Arch.

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How do you know which guide I'm looking at? I'm not reading the For Beginners guide on Arch.

Uh... okay. Then maybe you should start there? What is the specific issue so that we may help?

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I don't really remember. It's been a few months since I touched that thing. I'll try to recreate it for ya.

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I have never gone back to Windows the 2.5 years I've used Debian/Ubuntu. I don't use it.

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I suppose your arch issue could be the graphics driver, get to that point and let us know :)

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I tried installing Archbang, but after installing everytime, I get a blank screen on reboot. I look up these issues, so misleading...

 

Sounds like you may have come across the kernel of death, during the 3.10 branch. It was an irritating problem and quite hard to diagnose, it resulted in a blank screen very shortly after boot.

 

I have never seen the point in Archbang as a project myself, the installation procedure for setting up an arch/openbox system isnt all that hard at all. As for following guide after guide, that is the way arch works. The wiki is excellent, id even go as far to say its the best documentation of any linux distro.

Read through the following guides in order before installing and make sure you understand each step, im not implying any level of stupidity here but its so easy to rush through the installation and realise that you made a mistake somewhere down the line (I have done it myself a number of times and I have installed Arch many times on different systems).

 

Beginners Guide

XOrg

SLiM

Openbox

 

SLiM is just a login/desktop manager, only lighter than gdm, lightdm etc. There will be a little configuration involved but nothing that isnt covered in those guides. Follow the steps and you should be fine and the above will give you a very simple openbox environment with a very bare installation that you can then customise as you please using pacman. :)

 

I have never gone back to Windows the 2.5 years I've used Debian/Ubuntu. I don't use it.

Well done to you sir! (Y)

 

I suppose your arch issue could be the graphics driver, get to that point and let us know :)

The graphics system in Arch is very good, on the multiple systems i have installed Arch onto I have never come across and graphics based issues other than some flgrx issues using steam. But that is down to poor propriety drivers and the fact that steam is somewhat shoehorned into other distros :)

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OK, good, I have Arch up now. Using GDM with Openbox. Pretty ugly looking now, but I'll get to it.

 

Now, question, how to install Catalyst drivers? Preferably fgrlx (sp?) drivers, not radeon open-source ones. When I go

sudo pancman -S catalyst

it says that isn't recognized.

 

Is there something in pacman conf that I have to change?

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OK, good, I have Arch up now. Using GDM with Openbox. Pretty ugly looking now, but I'll get to it.

 

Now, question, how to install Catalyst drivers? Preferably fgrlx (sp?) drivers, not radeon open-source ones. When I go

sudo pancman -S catalyst

it says that isn't recognized.

 

Is there something in pacman conf that I have to change?

 

 

 

pacman not pancman

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Mispelled that. :( Im using pacman..

sudo pacman -S catalyst
error: target not found: catalyst
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Try Antergos! Should make things easier for you. 

 

antergos.com

 

As for GPU drivers: http://antergos.com/wiki/hardware/amd-catalyst-drivers/ 

 

I have a radeon as well on PC and I used this guide before without issues (now I don't even bother installing GPU drivers as I don't game in the Linux, only in Windows.. the open source driver is enough for me)

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I used Antegros before, I never really liked it for some odd reason.

 

But, aside from that, anyone know my problem getting catalyst drivers?

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Assuming you want the proprietary driver, you'll need to get it from the AUR:

yaourt -S catalyst-total
You'll also want to enable some services once you've installed it:

sudo systemctl enable catalyst-hook
sudo systemctl enable temp-links-catalyst
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I just thinks Its similar to use the tarballs, thats just me...

 

When I try to run the tarball, I get so:

[david@arch-desktop catalyst-total]$ makepkg -sci
==> WARNING: x86_64 system detected
==> WARNING: [multilib] repository must be uncommented in /etc/pacman.conf to add lib32-catalyst-utils into the package
==> WARNING: OK, lib32-catalyst-utils will be added to the package
==> Making package: catalyst-total 14.12-2 (Tue Mar 24 00:08:15 UTC 2015)
==> Checking runtime dependencies...
==> Installing missing dependencies...
error: target not found: xorg-server<1.17.0
==> ERROR: 'pacman' failed to install missing dependencies.

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Add this to /etc/pacman.conf

[xorg114]
Server = http://catalyst.wirephire.com/repo/xorg114/$arch

Then do a sync:

yaourt -Sy

This is all detailed in the wiki btw.

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Updates are released monthly? Good AV and you should be covered for the rest - I can't remember the last time I had a virus. 

 

More choices.... That's what most car manufacturers say as well. 

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Try spending 4 hours doing updates...

 

Viruses aren't the worst. Malware, Adware, Worms...

 

Can you change between different desktops? Can you change between 1000 different themes? Can you change almost 99% of your OS? With Windows, you are held to normally one or 2 desktops, about 5 themes, and is not configurable to the least unless you use software.

 

Sounds like you never used Linux, to a certain degree, at least.

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I'm a Linux user too... however i'm open minded enough to realise Linux is far from perfect, however neither is Windows.

The ignorant anti Windows replies in this thread do nothing to promote the Linux community, if anything they give Linux users a bad name...

 

2 things I hate about Windows. One, updates, updates, updates out their arse... Two, malware, viruses, the whole nine yards. Are there viruses in Linux? YES, but a hell lot less than Windows.


Updates on clean Windows install have not been an issue since Windows 8 was released. With Windows 8 Microsoft frequently release updated ISO's with the latest updates intergrated in. Linux has updates every day, i'm not sure exactly what point your making?
 
How often do you re install anyway?
 

Try spending 4 hours doing updates...


4 hours doing updates is better than 4 days trying to install a graphics driver... ;) the Windows user has already been 3 days and 20 hours more productive.

 

Actually he's right. The only way to stay truly safe on Windows is to never go online and never download programs. If you do either of those things you're going to get infected with a rootkit or malware at some point. That's why it's a bad idea to do any serious work in Windows. Games are fine but that's about it.


I guess all these fortune 500 companies are doing it wrong then?

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Updates on clean Windows install have not been an issue since Windows 8 was released. With Windows 8 Microsoft frequently release updated ISO's with the latest updates intergrated in. Linux has updates every day, i'm not sure exactly what point your making?

From my experience, Windows updates are terrible. You often have to do an update, reboot, wait, wait some more on shutdown and bootup while it applies updates, then repeat the whole process, sometimes multiple times. It's a symptom of the fact that Windows is just poorly designed. It has no proper package management, and system updates are a mess.

 

How often do you re install anyway?

A lot more than Linux due to Win-ROT and malware. But that's besides the point. Updates are always going to be available, so it's not a one time thing anyway. It's a persistant annoyance.

 

4 hours doing updates is better than 4 days trying to install a graphics driver... ;)

First of all, it takes me all of 5 minutes to install the catalyst driver on arch linux (and most of that is download time). Other distros are more beginner friendly and don't require cli access.

As for the 4 hours of updates, try upgrading a full version of Windows (including downloading). This is why I love my rolling release arch linux installation. There are no big time-consuming upgrades that often break things. It just updates all the software on the system when ever you choose. Simple and efficient, something Windows sorely lacks.

 

I guess all these fortune 500 companies are doing it wrong then?

Many corporate IT departments depend on Microsoft for their bread and butter. Without all the malware, rootkits, and BSOD's, they'd be out of a job. Besides, they're not exactly known for running the latest and greatest. A good portion are still running XP.

The real software that drives the internet and commerce though is Linux. You're just talking about bog standard cubicle desktop machines. They can all rot for all I care, and many of them do.

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