I like to try the latest Fedora and Suse distributions every year or so and see how far their developement is progressing.
Last time I tried fedora I got this and I akin it to "Linux use on the Desktop has died" and amongst a hundred other apt package issues, subsequently formatted the drive completey, Ill try again next year.
I would try Mandriva. I used its predecessor, Mandrake 9.1. It ran great on my Pentium III 550 Mhz PC with 128 MB ram. Of course you need a newer distro for drivers but I would guess Mandriva still has the same lean attitude Mandrake had.
It's really better if you have broadband. You select the packages you want and they come up installed when you boot into X the first time. At least they do with Mandrake or Mandriva "One CD" setup discs. If your internet is slow you might prefer a 3 CD set so that you have enough to get going. You're a developer so you should really bite the bullet cuz you ain't seen such free development stuff as in Linux. On my old 486 16 Mhz PC I was building CORBA servers from free downloaded code!! Your grandchildren would grow old before you could mess with all the development stuff you can get for it for nothing!
Mandrake used apt-get package tool so I'd assume Mandriva either uses that or the next generation of the same tool. Around that time packages started to become standardized and installs were much less of a headache than I suffered in the old Slackware 3.0 days. It became typical for an install to go smoothly and work correctly on the first shot. Unlike Windows, once you got something to work it was usually bullet proof after that. With a UPS and a journaling file system, you were nearly indestructible. Unstable? Are you kidding! I couldn't hard lock my PC once the 2.x kernels came out. Even if X hung I could always hotkey out to a terminal session and kill X, then just start it up again.
If I read the OP's specs right, he has 1/2 GB and you have 4. He should just slice off some HD, make a swap partition and a linux boot partition and go at it.I agree with those recommending VirtualBox, download here.
Here are two Linux distro's, Mandriva 2010 and GOS, running at the same time on Windows 7 desktop:
Can't complain!
Kari
512MB on 7? That would be one step from going backwards. As for Linux I use it on an old laptop for downloading and a little bit of C programming. I prefer 7, just because its well, 7. GCC works reasonably well too. I can't be bothered with virtualization - 7 has a permanent exclamation mark offline due to the network adaptor, assuming that the program works properly, USB and all.
Hi there
with the latest release of VMWARE PLAYER (3.0) you get 3-D support -- hence decent graphics and its FREE. It can also create VM's as well.
So if you want all those fancy Linux desktop effects such as rotating cubes etc etc I'd go for vmware's vmware player.
The main problem with running a Virtual machine is that you won't be able to run DVD or TV cards on them so no Video streaming apps. Audio is fine of course.
You probably won't be able to play some intensive games that make serious use of video hardware either -- but for non gamers using a Virtual machine is exactly the RIGHT way to test all this software out --and eventually if you can get hold of a spare machine you can convert your VM to a Physical machine and run it on real hardware too.
(I'm currently typing this on a full blown W7 X-64 Virtual Machine with fully enabled AERO effects on a X-64 bit SUSE 11.2 HOST system -- no probs whatsoever and it runs at near enough native speed too).
For the curious -- I'm doing it this way round since I need to test a number of features in IE8 that have been giving some problems when accessing a SAP JAVA J2EE server which is accessed via a host Portal.
Cheers
jimbo
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