More fuel for the present conflagration over Ubuntu and Fedora. I see that most of the problems with different distros are associated with what the user expects coupled with the selection of peripherals and so on on ones system. Like many others I have tried several distros at various times including : Mandrake 8.0, 9.0, 10.1 and Mandriva, Ubuntu, Knoppix, Damn Small Linux, Suse 9 and 10, Fedora Core 3, 4, 5, and now 6. Of all of them, the only ones which installed sweetly and found all the peripherals were Mandrake/Mandriva and Fedora. Due to some personal requirements, I have found that Fedora suits me best. My "permanent" installation has been FC3, then 4, 5 and now 6. None of the others provided me with exactly what I wanted and some distros seemed so very intractable when it came to the install process and particularly setting up my ADSL and Ethernet LAN. Fedora sets it all up without even asking! The only other minor difference I found is that it was very hard to get my Samsung CLP-500 color laser working properly despite Samsung claiming on the box that it was compatible with Linux. Under FC5 I had to call in a friendly Linux guru who took a couple of hours to get it working. When I went to FC6 a couple of days ago, I downloaded the Xerox Phaser 6000 driver (having been told that it worked better than the Samsung one) and within 10 minutes had the printer working OK. On the other hand, an experimental install of Mandriva allowed this printer to be set up quickly. FC6 even goes as far as to not recommend this model due to the inadequacy of the provided driver (the Samsung driver clobbers cups and several other daemons). So, all in all, despite them all being labeled << Linux >> each flavor of distro seems to have its own little quirks which render it suitable or otherwise for any particular instance. Croombe F. Pensom
