[Digikam-users] Best LInux distro for my needs?

[Sveinn í Felli]

Þann fim  2.sep 2010 13:16, skrifaði Paul Verizzo:
>   You may recall that I'm going to probably use an old
> computer dedicated to digiKam on Linux - that's how much I
> love this thing! - in order to gain stability and faster
> updates. I don't recall the specifics, but it's an older,
> slower machine. It runs Windows 2000 OK, but the USB is 1.0,
> so that gives you some clue as to hardware level. It will
> have to do for now.
>
> So, what's the best distro for me? First, minimal overhead
> on the computer. I'm thinking one of the KDE based laptop or
> netbook distros. Does that make sense?

Hi,

I'm running several distros on a 6yrs old Intel Pentium 
laptop 1600 Mhz with 1 Gb RAM, don't know if your specs are 
much lower:

Ubuntu 10.10 runs fine, I don't use Digikam on that one. On 
other machines I run Digikam flawlessly in Ubuntu/GNOME.

LinuxMint-9 runs Digikam 1.3 quite well, of course some 
operations lag a bit, depends on filesize. A bit more RAM 
would probably speed up things.
Upgrades are easy, most things come from the Ubuntu repos 
anyway.
Some people say that Mint is an Ubuntu with cosmetic 
changes, but those are also dealing with organisation and 
priorities.
Let's say that Mint may be a bit more 'understandable' by 
recent converts from Windows (even though it's green).

You'd inherit with both those distros the before-mentioned 
translation problems from KDE-vs-*buntu love/hate 
relationship - unless you take the step and learn how to 
deal with .po's and .mo's and make your own translations 
(which you then contribute to launchpad and KDE-upstream) ;-)

OpenSuse 11.2 KDE is a bit 'enterprise' oriented, quite 
large 'footprint' but still decent responsiveness, has very 
good internationalization support and well organized 
configuration tools. Some people hate their yast2 admin 
tool, but at least you can also run it in a sort of 
graphical mode from shell if there are problems with display 
drivers (and yes, my ATI has had problems).
Digikam 1.3 works much like in LinuxMint, if I wanted the 
latest cutting-edge version, one has to activate the 
'Factory', 'Factory:Desktop' and 'Extras' repositories.

I did have a partition with VectorLinux 6 KDE, which is a 
sort of Slackware but with a package-manager which pulls all 
dependencies for the source packages which are compiled on 
that particular machine. So maybe there you'd get the most 
specialized setup, with least pain. Not sure if there was 
any 'automatic upgrades' feature.
Had to sacrifice this partition for a bigger data partition.

Have tried others on this machine; PCLinuxOS was nice except 
for their horrible I18n support (charsets and stuff), 
Mandriva is fine but had problems with adopting KDE 
translations. Plain Debian I'd use on a server, same for 
Fedora.

Had Win2k installed originally, it may have been possible to 
run XP on it, but probably not Vista.

You really should give your Digikam installation some 
resources (Why not VirtualBox?), the experience is not the 
same on a low spec machine.
Don't know whether these take much resources.

Hope these points can be of help.

Best regards

Sveinn í Felli