Timex's Journal: preliminary to Distro LiveCD comparison

Tomhudson wrote recently about a laptop he eventually got, the HP dv9804ca.

About a year ago, I bought the dv9235nr, which is better in some ways, and not in others. (Hudson's has 802.11n capability, mine does not. Mine has an HDMI port, where Hudson's does not...)

At any rate, my beastie has Vista on it. I've been playing with various LiveCD distros (mostly Ubuntu, and Fedora, with Granular Linux next on the queue, and I would like to write up a review comparing the three.

Some things I look for involve compatibility with the hardware I have-- ethernet (wired and wireless), webcam, audio, and even the TV tuner that came with my laptop. From the software side, I don't do heavy gaming, but I like to play StarCraft and Second Life.

My question for all y'all is this: what sort of things are you interested in seeing compared between Ubuntu, Fedora, and whatever other distro I care to take a whack at?

[Edit, 4/16/2008: Corrected spelling of 'various' in third paragraph.]

Adding Programs

[Shadow Wrought]

I still have a lot to learn about Linux, but one of the biggest difficulties I've had is adding software. Mainly that's because all of my hardware is old (P166 level old!) so I've mostly been fiddling with things like DamnSmallLinux and Puppy Linux. Which work fairly well, but because of the size constraints, it is not always easy to add programs that aren't already in package form for them. I'm inclined to think that that's pretty easy on the more modern ones, but I don't know for sure.

Re:

[iminplaya]

Slax [slax.org] is my fave. Easy to add modules and save your prefs. And it's pretty small. Around 200 meg

Re:

[tqft]

You have seen this?

http://www.puppylinux.org/wikka/dpup [puppylinux.org]

Links to dotpup collections up top and how to make your own dotpup below.

Re:

[ncc74656]

I still have a lot to learn about Linux, but one of the biggest difficulties I've had is adding software. Mainly that's because all of my hardware is old (P166 level old!) so I've mostly been fiddling with things like DamnSmallLinux and Puppy Linux. Which work fairly well, but because of the size constraints, it is not always easy to add programs that aren't already in package form for them.

Some of you might groan at this suggestion, but the footprint for a basic Gentoo install is fairly small (a few hun

OpenSolaris

[Kymermosst]

Maybe take a whack at one of the OpenSolaris distributions? http://opensolaris.org/os/downloads/ [opensolaris.org]

Would be interesting to see what you think just trying a Solaris Live CD and comparing it to the Linux offerings from a user point of view.