Mirror, mirror, on the wall, which is the best distro of them all?

My hosting provider recently upgraded everyone’s month bandwidth limit to 2 Terabytes. I wasn’t sure what to do with all this extra bandwidth, so I decided be help mirror some popular but under-mirrored Linux distributions. Currently I am hosting 4 different “flavors” of Linux:

These can all be downloaded at http://www.linuxlefty.com/projects/mirrors

Last month, my bandwidth usage was 82 Meg. However, yesterday alone I used up 100 Gigs of bandwidth. Hopefully this will take a little load off of the projects’ main servers

I’ve used Ubuntu Linux for a number of years and have found it to be an excellent distro of Linux. It is by far one of the most popular (if not the most popular) version of Linux around and has a huge user base.

However, I’ve been looking into trying a different distro for some time now. I enjoy trying out different distros to see what is available in the Linux community. I’ve tried almost 15 different distros, covering every major one out there ( other than Arch and Slackware ). I came across PCLinuxOS last week and was hoping to install it over spring break.

However, for some reason my root partition ( I did a cold reboot when the system hung doing a hard-drive intensive operation ) got corrupted and I needed to reinstall my OS. I really didn’t want to take the time to reinstall, but this is my only system and I need it for school.

So, I installed PCLinuxOS and I was very impressed. All my hardware worked out of the box (even 3D acceleration with aiglx). I was very impressed! The system is very responsive and snappy. I haven’t used it for long, but I think PCLinuxOS is definitely a distro to check into!

This week I came across two funny “How to’s”.

The first was a guide on how to successfully install Windows Vista. The person who made the how-to spent over 12 hours fighting with the installer. He downloaded countless incompatible drivers and encountered numerous hardware conflict issues. He finally figured out how to install Vista and wrote the following tutorial on it:

In addition, I came across A Guide to Grading. It’s a good read and a good laugh. I’ve had some teachers that must grade like this

So far, school has been going fairly well. I’ve had a couple of weeks now and here are how my school is starting to pan out:

• Cell Biology/Cell Biology Lab: Hard but interesting. I’ve never taken a biology course before so this has been quite challenging. However, it is very interesting. First we started with atoms, then moved to molecules, and we just finished studying about water. It is a fascinating subject!

• Advanced English Composition: Hard but interesting. This class requires a lot of research and writing, but I like the professor a lot. I’m researching ways to circumvent China’s Golden Shield (great firewall of china). I’ve found a lot of interesting information and am looking forward to writing the papers.

• Databases: Moderate difficulty and interesting. I’ve worked with databases in the past and fortunately, the professor is letting us use MySQL (yay!). The material is very interesting and hopefully I’ll learn how to design better databases

• Classical Music Appreciation: Easy and interesting. I’m learning a lot about music and the various time periods of music. It’s a very fun class.

• Self Defense: Easy and fun. This is an interesting class and is a lot of fun. It’s quite easy, but then again, it’s only a 1 credit class

• Differential Equations: Painful but kind of interesting. This is my second time around with this class and already I’m struggling with the material. However, this professor is much better at explaining things and I’m understanding the material better than I did the first time around. If I work hard, I should be able to pass the class this time, but the always say the third time’s the charm

So, I’ve got some easy, lots of fun and some hard classes. But, the best part is that I’m almost DONE!