Slackware!
No Slackware takers yet? This is possibly my favorite distribution. It's a very "DIY" style of distro.
My machine is actually Slack 10.2 with some heavy modifications ... I keep up to date with the kernel, waiting on 2.6.24. In fact, many times it's not convenient for me to "upgrade" to Slackware 12 because of the customizations I've made.
Much of the emphasis in modern distributions has been on the gui, user-friendliness, and usability factors. Being a huge command-line fan, I feel right at home with Slackware.
People will ask me, (wanting to try a Linux distribution out) "which one is best?"
Well if I could answer that, I could also tell you what type of car you would like to buy and what you'd like to order from dinner from a restaurant.
My answer is always the same ... try a bunch out and see which suits you best!
To be fair, I also do like CentOS and Debian as well. They make fantastic servers. My "guinea-pig" machine at home will always be Slackware, though.
Any other Slack fans?
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Slackware is best for me
I have been running slackware for may years. I am currently on version 12.0 and love it. I find it to be very stable.
Slackware 13 rocks!
I went from MacOSX (I know, it's not Linux :) ) to Yellow Dog Linux on PowerPC to Fedora to Ubuntu to Debian and FINALLY landed on Slackware vers 13 running Fluxbox! Slackware is da bomb!!
Yes, it's best distro for
Yes, it's best distro for me. Well i am using its 64bit clone - slamd64 on my laptop. But I've compiled most of my programs because slamd64 hasnt many packages available (or those are old..). I like when it's made from scratch!
You could always run
You could always run something like qemu and run virtual 32bit guest machines inside of your 64bit host machine!
I've been doing this lately. I have a heavily-modified version of slack 10.2, but I'd like to migrate to a 12.0 base. So I setup qemu with a guest machine and loaded slack 12 on it. I've been "living inside" the guest machine lately.
Many of my modifications, compiled programs, data files, etc live on other partitions ... so it shouldn't be too difficult to move 100% over to slack 12 eventually.
You could do the same thing, should you need something that works solely in a 32bit environment.
-- FLR or flrichar is a superfan of Linux Journal, and goofs around in the LJ IRC Channel