[aklug] Distributions, and a couple liesurely questions

From: Brian ThunderEagle <thundereagle@hotmail.com>
Date: Thu Mar 19 2009 - 14:39:19 AKDT

1) Distributions

There are so many these days I don't know what I'm going to get. Right now I'm using Sabayon and I like it but it doesn't seem to have as much support as other distros. I'm looking for suggestions on a good distro that can fulfill some of my needs.
a) Preferably Beryl as a standard option, not a messy add-on after installation
b) Driver support for ATI Radeon Mobility, something with known DRI support for ATI.
c) Emulation support in some way for windows such as Wine.
d) No clutter, as much as I like Sabayon there is way too much stuff loading from the get go that bogs everything down.
e) Fairly good laptop support, It seems that some lesser distros don't like the hardware in laptops, most notably wireless and audio.
I was considering either Suse or more so Ubuntu but would like to hear some suggestions before I wipe my computer.

2) Questions

a) DRI and ATI
There seems to be a lot of problems with ATI cards and DRI not working properly. Installing the latest driver got rid of my errors stating DRI is not supported, however I still was unable to run fgl_fglxgears/fgl_glxgears. Anybody have some success information with DRI and ATI?

b) Emulation
Is Wine still the leader in this catagory? I have never had much luck with it and would like to know if anyone else has developed something better that I haven't heard about.

c) MonoDevelop (C#)
Has anyone by some slim chance come out with something similar to Microsofts XNA Framework? I would love to write some games for Linux, and something similar to XNA would be convenient.

d) Games
Has anyone played Vendetta or Regnum on Linux? I found them on LinuxGameTome and would just like to hear if anyone has played them and how they were.

As always I value AKLUGs input and appreciate anyone who can spare the time to offer advice.

     - Brian ThunderEagle
     - thundereagle@hotmail.com

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Received on Thu Mar 19 14:39:30 2009

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