For workstations, FreeBSD. NetBSD is more suitable for embedded devices.

I did the fixmbr thing but I still get the GRUB menu
any clue?

Quote: Original post by Alpha_ProgDes
Well, I've just acquired a Sony Vaio laptop with a PI processor. Now my questions is what should I go with? Ubuntu or BSD? If BSD, netBSD or freeBSD?

Depends on what exactly you want to use it for.

Multimedia:
Go with something a little more common, like SuSE or Fedora.

Development:
Go with something more friendly to developers, like Ubuntu, FreeBSD, or SuSE.

Games:
Stick with Windows. Pains me to say it, but you won't get your gaming fix in Linux, unfortunately. If you MUST try to play Windows games in Linux, Wine and Cedega work pretty well in Fedora.

Thanks for the help but I fixed the problem.
Apparently I set the boot flag on the second partition so
it was booting from there.
now everything is fine. So I guess I will give Ubuntu a go.

Cheers.

I used Ubuntu for a white(as a second OS... still primarily a windows user, but sometimes I go on linux binges). I like Ubuntu a lot, but I became very annoyed with it when I tried to get ruby+rails working right... something that should be very simple became incredibly annoying. It had something to do with the way ruby was packing the ruby libs and whatnot... I don't know. I tried several "solutions" from online and none worked right.

So I said screw it... I've been wanting to give pure debian another shot for quite a while, so I installed Debian and so far I've been really happy with it. It just "feels" better to me.

I'm using Ubuntu Edgy Eft, I did prefer Dapper, but I didn't know I prefered it until I already updated and I don't feel like undoing it.

I also use FreeBSD sometimes.

I've started with slackware. I installed it on my laptop, so I used it mostly when i was out of home. I think It's a great distro for beginners. Surely you'll have to spent a bit more time at the beginning, but after that you'll have the taste of how to work with any linux distro. Since then, I've tried FC, suse, Mandrake/Mandriva, ubuntu and now I'm using gentoo. FC, suse and mandriva sucked from the beginning, I've remove them after a few days. Ubuntu was very nice, but I like to compile everything locally, so I've chosen gentoo. It has a very nice feature of USE flags. You specify some flags in /etc/make.conf and then it builds all the packages using those USE flags. You have to set those flags, it took me about 30-40min, but this way you're sure that all apps you are using have all the features you need. But the compilation might take a while. On my old AthlonXP 2500+@2400Mhz, 1gb ram full installation took about 9hrs. After 30-40min i had small install without any x, and the compilation of Xfce, x.org and family took the remaining 8hrs. But after that, when you are using ccache, the recompilation is 5 to 10 times faster, only the new apps are slow. Also installing nvidia drivers(AIGLX) + compiz was very easy. And the effect is amazing. After few days it's hard to go back to classic window managers :P
But if you don't want to compile everything I'd suggest ubuntu. Its easy, and I had no problems with it.

Thanks everyone, i give Ubuntu a go.

I'm trying Kubuntu now. I had OpenSuse 10.0 previously and still have it on a older system. Kubuntu is quite empty. It is huge 3.6GB download but there isn't anything on it. OpenSuse 10.0 was 5 CDs but comes with plenty of interesting stuff.

When I run Doom 3 on Kubuntu fullscreen and then quit, it doesn't restore the desktop resolution.

In my experience with many distros, they all have problems. They can't get graphical things to work on Linux perfectly. It's always slow.
However, it seems as if Kubuntu/Ubuntu has better graphics performance than on OpenSuse. It is noticeable even without benchmarks, both 2D and 3D.

why are these linex downloads so big, they seem to be bigger than windows...and very slow downloads too.