Linux distro recs?

[blnchflr]

I've been using Ubuntu as my primary OS since May last year, and while I'm extremely happy with it, I would like to become more Linux-savvy.

I'm looking for another newbie-friendly/newbie-semi-friendly distro to dual-boot with Ubuntu, to see what the differences are, etc. - any recs?

(P.S. I've been giving OpenSolaris - I know it's not Linux - a couple of goes over the last weeks, but in the end, I just could not get it to play nice with Ubuntu, so I gave it up. Very shiny OS, though!)

Comments

[zvi]

My suggestion (as someone who has only and always ever run Ubuntu) is that you might want to try running one of the tiny distros. The two I am thinking of, PuppyLinux and DSLinux, both have pretty passionate user communities, so you can ask questions when things go wrong, and they have relatively decent starts at documentation. As importantly, the problems you are going to run into with DSL or Puppy are likely to be different than the ones you run into with Ubuntu, especially if, instead of installing them on a partition, you run them off 1G memory sticks.

Even if that's not the direction you go in, I think you may want to look for a distro that will help you solve a problem that Ubuntu's not helping with or that does something besides run your desktop like Ubuntu. That will give you a reason to not just boot into it, but concentrate on fixing bits of it that you may not run into with Ubuntu.

[blnchflr]

I've run Knoppix and Puppy as livecds, but never tried installing. Puppy had a really great installation guide, as I remember; how to partition and everything. It might be fun to install and see how fast it is from the harddisc, which should at least decrease boot-time, even if running it isn't faster, since I have enough RAM (2GB).

(ETA: I think my main problem with getting OpenSolaris to play nice was using the ext4 filesystem - OpenSolaris obviously couldn't detect Ubuntu - and I'm wondering if I'll have the same trouble with Puppy. Guess I'll find out.)

I think you may want to look for a distro that will help you solve a problem that Ubuntu's not helping with or that does something besides run your desktop like Ubuntu
That makes good sense!