What is the best linux distrib to use for df

[jonnyw]

I understand that this is a hard one to answer, because of the differences in the amount of time to complete one generation to the next, but I was just wondering which linux distribution people find to be the fastest (or best if other factors come in to consideration) to be used for distributed folding.

Am getting a second hard disk tomoroow, and am going to put linux on it

Please also give an idea of how good the particular distribution is other than folding as well, as i've never had my own linux distribution before (only used red hat at uni).


cheers

[PCZ]

If you are a relative newbie to linux, then use either Red Hat
or Mandrake.

Go here and read the Forums

[Paratima]

You are going to hear about everybody's favorites! My choice is SuSE!

The bottom line is how much time your machine spends actually executing the client and how long is spent in doing file I/O, communications, and other "system" functions.

The "kernal" in all of the various distributions is pretty much the same. If you have your system configured optimally, you don't spend much time executing system code, regardless of which distro you choose. Therefore, look for the systems that come with the "best" standard configuration or are most easily configurable. But then you have to know how to do it! So you really need to be an expert to get optimum performance anyway.

SuSE, Red Hat, and Mandrake, in no particular order, are the top three in terms of ease of installation and use. If you have a friend who is familiar with one, that might be enough reason to pick one over the others. Otherwise, just read the material on their web sites, pick one, and have a go at it. You can probably get a good bit of (maybe too much) help and advice in this forum or from your team members.

[jonnyw]

ended up giving lycoris a go, will perform a 24 hour benchmark with that (starting from gen 0), and one with XP when I get some time, and post the results here.

[tpdooley]

phase II works a bit differently than Phase I did. The exact same hardware was taking 3 days for a set of 250 gens, and then a week for the next set of 250 gens.

[QIbHom]

The best linux distro to use is the one you can get the most help with. If all your buddies use SuSE, use SuSE. If they use Red Hat, use Red Hat. If they use Lindows, move out of town and change your name <g>.

Personally, I like Libranet. It is Debian based, we have a really good user community and it is Canadian, just like DF.

When I was getting ready to switch from SuSE, I signed on to a few of the distro e-mail lists to get an idea of how much good help was given, how much topic drift tended to happen and what the typical problems were. Just a few days on a list will give you a pretty good idea of what the user community is like, how responsive the people who put out the distro are and what some typical problems are. Scanning user fora, when available, can also be useful, although some distros do everything or most stuff through e-mail.

[Ned]

Although I've tried various versions of Red Hat and Mandrake, I recently tried the Gentoo Linux. It's claim to fame is that there are various flavours depending on the flavour of CPU you're running. In the past, you needed to compile at least some subsystems from scratch (and you can still do it that way if you want the ultimate...), but now they include pre-compiled major subsystems on their second CD by CPU flavour.

Mine you, you may still need to learn some system stuff to get it to boot, but if you wanted some motivation to learn some of the basics, this is a good one.

Their other claim to fame is their update facility, which is probably one of the better free ones in Linux world. Its automated and internet sourced.

My two cents worth...

Ned

[Dyyryath]

Yeah, Gentoo rocks. It's my personal favorite. I probably wouldn't suggest it to a Linux newbie, though, unless they were installing Linux with the specific goal of learning all about it.