Over the years I've used various Linux distributions with the goal of trying to find a system which is easily upgradable and maintanable, and supports my research work. I really don't want to have to reinstall my machines and learn how to do it all over again every time - it seems like configuration files and scripts are always moving around and its impossible to get a machine to setup easily without piles of messing around.

Over time I have used Slackware, Redhat, Knoppix, Debian, and Ubuntu - in that order. Of all the distributions I've used, the Debian-based ones are the best. The packaging system works really well and is easy to use. Slackware doesn't really do packages and I've been burned by RedHat in the past so much that I refuse to touch anything using RPMs any more. Knoppix looked promising because everything just worked, but over time the packages become out of date and there is no proper upgrade path. Debian is quite good but the stable releases are not very frequent and the testing releases tend to break quite a lot. So I have settled on using Ubuntu these days. Ubuntu is really the most fantastic thing to happen to Linux - they have a frequent release cycle and so you can target your applications to a particular release and be sure that things will not change on you over time. The releases also include binary firmware blobs and all the little things so that you don't have to do these things yourself.

So don't mess with any other Linux distributions. Ubuntu is the only one worth considering at the current moment. I use it on my mobile AR systems and on my laptops and desktops and it works great for everything.

Getting 3D to work under Linux can be a real pain at times. I think it is the greatest thing in the world - one day hopefully XFree86 will be written to be purely accelerated OpenGL calls via DRI. Many people have 3D hardware but don't know how to configure it or even realise if it is working!

My 3D hardware of choice is Nvidia. They have the best drivers and they just always work. I've been using Nvidia hardware ever since Dell brought out the awesome Inspiron 8100 laptop series, and I've never ever had a problem with the drivers crashing or acting unexpectedly. The nice part is that the drivers work on all Nvidia hardware from TNT2 upwards, and they use the same config files. So I have one XF86Config-4 which I share between all my systems, and use xchanger which is described below. Just for the record in case anyone is googling for info, the Nvidia drivers do not compile properly with kernel 2.6.4 - it seems like the kbuild script has some kind of wierd dependency issue. The Nvidia 6111 series driver works well with 2.6.8 kernel, so if you are having problems with compilation at least try that! Nowadays Ubuntu includes all the Nvidia drivers so you don't have to compile anything, I would recommend this option as being the easiest.

I have a Radeon 9000 in my IBM Thinkpad T40p right now, and this works straight out of the box running Knoppix with no changes required - I was very impressed. The Radeon DRI driver is not as good as the Nvidia one, I have been able to crash it quite easily when playing with resolutions and settings in my XF86Config-4 file, which was quite annoying. The driver also doesn't support dual head at the same time as 3D acceleration! We have also used the ATI binary drivers on another laptop and had no end of problems with them as well. For now I've got the DRI stuff working but it was a bit of a pain and I don't want to keep messing around with this. For those googling for info on Radeon DRI problems, you must make sure you are not running the frame buffer modules! So make sure radeonfb.o and anything else with fb on it is not running. I haven't worked out how to disable modules from running, so make sure you either delete the module file or recompile your kernel so there is no FB support at all. The FB and DRI support do not mix!

But in summary, if you want to do really high end 3D on Linux, the Nvidia driver is the only way to go. We refuse to buy ATI hardware in the lab any more, the drivers just don't work.