Thumbs up to ALT Linux!

[firemoth]

Just a small note: this is not an ad, just in some odd case you might think so.

Here is my story:

I began with Linux about 3 months ago. I have gone the numerous distributions, from Lycoris, to Red Hat, to Mandrake, and also Debian, and more. All of them were pretty pleasing, but they would always have some minor annoyance. Mandrake took 3 minutes to boot, Lycoris lacked many things, Debian had USB problems. So I was always looking for a distribution that had no hassle at all! One that was powerful, not crippled (like Lycoris), fast, current (unlike Debian), and not bloated. I was on distrowatch when I saw another one. ALT.

I traveled to their website, and saw that they were very much commercial. However, they give ISO's for current releases also. I looked on this site and even searched google. It seems like it isn't popular on this site (no posts about it) and the google search yielded nothing but the official site. I noticed that they had a new beta version of one of their releases. It has:

Kernel 2.4.20
KDE 3.1 RC5
Gnome 2.1
and more I don't remember.

So I downloaded all 3 disks and installed it. It is Mandrake-based, it uses DrakX as the installer, however slightly modified. I also uses only a few of the Mandrake config tools, modified too. I installed the KDE. I was greeted by the Beautiful KDE 3.1 desktop. I fell in love. I fell in love even more when I found out the main package manager is Synaptic and also APT-GET, with their own very big RPM repository.

So far, I haven't had any problems at all, except a minor KDE mount/unmount devices issue when it would be a little buggy. So I disabled the automatic showing of devices on the desktop, and made links the classic way (right click, add device--) and also disabled automount (which the distro comes with) by unchecking autofs from the processes that automatically start.

I think this is a very good distro that should be used more. I wonder why I haven't seen it on this site...

I think the URL is www.altlinux.com

[CMonster]

It's always good to see another Linux distribution ...

[Can O' Beans]

Is it as slow & bloated as Mandrake? (serious question :p )

[firemoth]

Actually its much faster, and much less things are installed that Mandrake. About 600-700 MB for KDE, multimiedia, dev, and internet.

[unspoken000]

Thanks for the infoe on altlinux. I'm always looking for new disto's to try out. Right now I'm using Suse 8.1, (SuSe Rocks), but gonna give this altlinux a try.

[sclebo05]

are you using the Master or the Junior version of altlinux? just asking because i am thinking about trying it out.

[Okie]

yeah, i just got AltLinux Junior-2.2 ISOs 1 & 2 downloaded, burned & installed so far i think it is an exellent distro!!! it uses Mandrake's installer which is cool & a easy no brainer to install, i am using it right now as i type this, and i highly reccomend this distro for anyone, especially newbies or those that just want to slam a Linux distro in and be done with it...

i give AltLinux Junior-2.2 a BIG thumbs up:cool:

[chucksaysword2]

Oooh... it's from Russia. I like Russia. I may eventually install this but I've never felt really compelled to try a Mandrake distro. Still looks interesting though.

[Okie]

even though AltLinux borrows heavily from Mandrake it does seem lighter on its feet than Mandrake's distro, if you have the disk space for trying out other distros and the bandwith for downloading ISOs and a burner for burning CD-Rs i would say "Give it a spin" it is worth it...

[virtualsky]

I have to agree, here. ALT Linux is quite a nice easy distro. I installed it on my ''test'' PC earlier this week and liked it allot.

Today I decided that it was time to update my Mandrake 8.2 PC to the latest 9.1. At the end of the update, when it came time to set up my XFree Config, Mandrake could not configure my Nvidia graphics card. I mean, 8.2 handled it with no problem, what was with 9.1?

After finding no help on the web, I said the hell with it and put ALT Linux on instead. The install and configure went just fine. Although I had to reset my user permissions in my /home directory.. but that was nothing major and only took a few minutes.

I like ALT Linux very much and will stick with it. The Synaptic installer really is easy and handy.

David,
Virtual Sky Media Group (http://www.virtualsky.net)

[shadowrider]

what's synaptic? is it mandrake-based installer?

[itor66]

So if Alt linux is like mandy which is based on redhat, does that mean that commands (and books) for redhat are equally valid in Alt Linux?

[Hayl]

Originally posted by shadowrider
what's synaptic? is it mandrake-based installer?

its a gtk-based graphical front-end to apt.

[Okie]

# apt-get

[gvy]

Hi there, thanks for warm words.

Regarding questions and help -- have a look at http://altlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/community-en/ to subscribe to english-speaking community mailing list.

For those looking for hot-from-the-press results of our work, see also beta (ftp://ftp.altlinux.ru/pub/distributions/ALTLinux/beta/) (if/when available -- generally there is none), or even this alpha (ftp://ftp.altlinux.org/pub/people/rider/ISO/compact-20030910.iso) (as of this posting; it could be updated even this evening, then look here (ftp://ftp.altlinux.org/pub/people/rider/ISO/) for a fresher one).

There are some *really* nifty things (let alone usual bugfixes) there :-)