I recently purchased an Alienware gaming laptop on Craigslist, and I am in the process of preparing it for use as my school computer. Up until now, I used it primarily as a gaming machine while I was away from my main desktop rig. One of the key needs I have is a Linux environment to code in. Not that Windows is completely incompatible with development, but I have been “raised” to develop in Linux as a native environment throughout the course of my CS degree, and our code also has to run on the Linux kernel, so for test-driven development, it’s much easier to have Linux locally. Much of my development is done for headless, command-line utilities, but some things require GUIs, or other graphical interaction that makes a local environment easy. And yes, I understand that X-forwarding is an option, but it’s less than optimal and often times very slow.
Anyhow, on that note, I’m looking for the best lightweight Linux distribution with the best support for packages. I have been using Fedora 15 on my previous laptop, and Fedora 14 in a Virtualbox VM on my home workstation. However, until I have the chance to upgrade the RAM in this Alienware from 4GB to 8GB (which will be happening soon), I’d like a lightweight environment. I’m currently downloading several distributions with various X11 environments, and will be putting them through the paces over the course of the next couple days. I may end up back in Fedora with a different environment, but I’m hoping to find a more lightweight environment without some of the issues Fedora brings along (e.g. crappy SELinux implementation). So stay tuned for those updates over the course of the next few days as I settle into my final semester as an undergrad.
Also, be looking for a post all about my new laptop; it’s sick, and a steal for the price I paid!