Looking for a more stable long term linux distro


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For the past two and a half years or so I have been running ubuntu as my main OS. I have been happy with it, I have had a few issues, but most I have been able to fix. I currently have 8.04 LTS installed and think it is pretty good. I have heard bad things about 8.10 and am not too sure I want to go that route. I love the debian package system, but I am flexible. What distro would you recommend (gnome based) that is more stable and has a longer life cycle for support and updates. I basically want something that I can setup and forget about other than adding or removing apps. I am looking at purchasing a laptop and that would be the system I am looking at installing it on. Is centos worth looking at?

Thank You,

Josh

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I would highly recommend Arch Linux. It's a much simpler OS than Ubuntu and most popular distros today (there is no GUI install and it doesn't come with any DE). However, it is constantly up-to-date (they use a "rolling release" system) and the package manager (pacman) is fantastic, miles better than aptitude in my opinion. Plus it is growing rapidly in popularity.

It may seem daunting to go with such a simple, barebones distro at first, but you will learn a lot more about Linux in the process. Their wiki is great and has a great breadth of information on just about any topic (like installing GNOME). All in all I feel a lot freer in this distro.

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How hard is it to setup arch for mp3 and dvd play back, I noticed in some of the other distros other than ubuntu that it was harder to setup.

I am looking at downloading some distros to test and I want to run a 64bit copy and the computer has an intel core 2 duo, which version do I download, I am looking at Debian and I have options for amd64 and ia64

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How hard is it to setup arch for mp3 and dvd play back, I noticed in some of the other distros other than ubuntu that it was harder to setup.

I am looking at downloading some distros to test and I want to run a 64bit copy and the computer has an intel core 2 duo, which version do I download, I am looking at Debian and I have options for amd64 and ia64

I haven't needed DVD playback, but their wiki page for it looks promising.

As for mp3s, it should be as simple as installing a player (e.g. ncmpcpp, mpd, banshee, whatever) and the correct codecs (probably gstreamer). You may want to take a look at the Beginner's Guide. Or "Common codecs".

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for debian which download do I want for an intel core 2 duo for x64, the amd64 or the ia64. Most distros categorize 64bit as x86_64 so I am not sure which download I want

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I am looking at downloading some distros to test and I want to run a 64bit copy and the computer has an intel core 2 duo, which version do I download, I am looking at Debian and I have options for amd64 and ia64

You would download ia64 (Intel architecture 64-bit). The other one is compiled for the AMD architecture.

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You would download ia64 (Intel architecture 64-bit). The other one is compiled for the AMD architecture.

Consumer Intel processors are compatible with AMD64 processor instructions, and ia64 is in fact Itanium and is not a consumer processor with a completely different architecture. He needs amd64, ia64 will not run on his computer.

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Consumer Intel processors are compatible with AMD64 processor instructions, and ia64 is in fact Itanium and is not a consumer processor with a completely different architecture. He needs amd64, ia64 will not run on his computer.

I didn't really knew that... Always thought that IA64 stood for Intel Architecture 64-bits, the consumer ones not the Itanium. Wrong all of this time... :/

Thanks for the correction.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium

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You may want to look into CentOS. It is the enterprise grade version of Fedora and is geared towards servers or workstations. It is a very solid OS and would be very stable. I am not sure how it would run on a laptop though (sleep,wifi,etc), so you may want to go with the consumer version - Fedora 10.

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Thanks for clearing up the x64 download issue, I always thought it was amd64 even though it was a intel chip, but I wasn't sure. I will look into centos. I tried arch and didn't really get through the install, it was kind of daunting to me.

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