Wich linux destro.

[taazz]

Ok, here it goes, I'm trying to gather opinions on which linux distribution should I use for dual booting on my windows 7 laptop for lazarus development.

The idea is to
1) be 100% compatible with windows 7 (I have no desire to reinstall windows and all my tools)
2) allow me to re-size my existing partitions with out data loss to create it's own partition,
3) Can read and write ntfs partitions I have all my data/programs and some customer data on a second partition other than the primary which must be used so I can easely exchange data between the 2 operating systems.
4) easy to recognize and mount external usb devices my stick and backup disk (local svn repository).
5) it will not give me a lot of grief to install it.

I had some limited experience with redhat linux 3 or 4 if I remember correctly and SUSE 7. Both gave me a lot of grief installing drivers suse made sorry I bought it with my unsupported graphics card back then and redhat had problems with a brand new intel network card.
I spend around 2 months search the net back then to find out that the specific cards where not supported and I needed to either leave with the default (VGA I think on suse) or buy new ones

anyway that was more than a few years back, Today I'm focusing on easy of installation both OS and lazarus extremely stable graphics libraries with antialising on par with windows and of course stable ntfs drivers that is a must I can't stretch that enough the customer I have are very sensitive and at the moment I have no back up for them so if anything goes wrong.........

 so any recommendations?

[Leledumbo]

be 100% compatible with windows 7 (I have no desire to reinstall windows and all my tools)

Unclear, what kind of "compatibility" do you expect? Never use Windows' brain on other OSes, as don't use other OSes' brain on Windows. There will NEVER be 100% compatibility. If you want to get in to Linux, learn it as-is. Don't windows-ize it.*

*: Common problem for Linux users coming from Windows, as long as you stick with this "paradigm", getting in to Linux would only be a dream... just my 2 cents

2) allow me to re-size my existing partitions with out data loss to create it's own partition,

Modern Linux distros (*buntu, Mint, Mageia, etc) have built-in partition editor, usually offered during installation, with front end depends on used DE.

3) Can read and write ntfs partitions I have all my data/programs and some customer data on a second partition other than the primary which must be used so I can easely exchange data between the 2 operating systems.

As with 2), most of them should be equipped with ntfs-3g, which is capable of reading/writing ntfs partition.

4) easy to recognize and mount external usb devices my stick and backup disk (local svn repository).
5) it will not give me a lot of grief to install it.

Same with 2) and 3)

[Zoran]

I have dual boot Win7 64 bit and Kubuntu 12.04 32 bit and it seems to me that it satisfies all your requests.
I also have another ntfs partition and I share documents on this partition between Windows and Kubuntu.

I have no experience with Linux other that Ubuntu and Kubuntu. I used Ubuntu until they started with Unitiy desktop, which is a real disaster in my opinion. Then I switched to Kubuntu. Now I really prefer KDE to Gnome.
So, I cannot tell you much about other distros, but I can tell that Kubuntu works for me.

[TurboRascal]

be 100% compatible with windows 7 (I have no desire to reinstall windows and all my tools)

Unclear, what kind of "compatibility" do you expect?

I think OP simply meant there would be no need to reinstall windows after installing linux. If that's the case, ALL modern linux distributions give the option to boot to the original OS after installation. Moreover, windows wouldn't need reinstallation even if losing the ability to boot to it (which never happened to me in this century btw), they would just need reinstallation of the boot loader, or even better, manually putting them into GRUB/LILO/whatever menu.

Currently I'd recommend Mint. It has the user friendliness Ubuntu started, but offers a classic Gnome desktop (Mate or Cinnamon). If you don't mind Gnome 3 and Unity, you can also use Ubuntu. If you prefer another desktop instead, you can go for Kubuntu, Xubuntu or Lubuntu, or again Mint with another desktop package.

Personally, I prefer Mint's LMDE edition, but if you don't know what is Debian, what is its Testing distribution, or why would you want it, then it's probably not for you Another benefit of LMDE is that it's rolling release, so it never grows old.

[BigChimp]

Ok, here it goes, I'm trying to gather opinions on which linux distribution should I use for dual booting on my windows 7 laptop for lazarus development.

Just to throw something out there: I'm quite happy developing on Windows and having some (Debian, with XFCE desktop) virtual machines (using Virtualbox) to adapt code to Linux. If you are primarily developing for Linux this may obviously not be so handy, but if your laptop is fast enough, it's worth a thought.

With virtual machine snapshots, you can even roll back to a known good configuration and try again.

My machine used to dual boot into Linux as well (on a separate partition) and I set up a Virtualbox VM with that physical partition; handy if you forgot something on the machine or want to quickly test something.

Debian, Mint or Mint Debian edition would probably be what I'd recommend for a dual boot environment... depending on taste, but as others said, compatibility with Windows is not a factor anymore.

[ludob]

1) be 100% compatible with windows 7 (I have no desire to reinstall windows and all my tools)

Installing grub or any other boot manager changes the MBR. Win7 used to not like this and repair installs were sometimes needed breaking grub again. Before installing any distribution, Google for dual boot Windows 7 and your distribution instructions to minimise the risks.

I used Ubuntu until they started with Unitiy desktop,

Same here. Software Center is also a disaster compared to synaptic for a development environment. I stick with ubuntu 10.04 LTS and am evaluating other distributions for when the LTS ends.

and of course stable ntfs drivers that is a must I can't stretch that enough the customer I have are very sensitive and at the moment I have no back up for them so if anything goes wrong.........

I don't see how backup is related to ntfs drivers. If your computer contains important information, back it up regularly on an external or network device and especially before installing anything on it or resizing partitions.
If you are sharing an ntfs drive between linux and windows the risk of something going wrong increases. Be prepared for Win 7 sometimes starting a chkdsk at bootup or linux refusing to mount the ntfs drive because it thinks it wasn't shut down correctly. At least that is my experience with it. If possible use a network drive to share the data.
Also don't forget that ntfs drivers on linux have very limited knowledge of windows ACL which is another risk factor. 

[JuhaManninen]

I throw in my recommendation, too: Mint Linux, KDE edition

I had OpenSuse and Sabayon in past but got some hardware problems. Mint + KDE is currently the best choice as "just-works" distro for people who do not want to tweak it much.

If you try to choose between Gnome2 and Gnome3 and Gnome3 which looks like Gnome2 and the new Gnome2 fork and Ubuntu's Unity and whatever there are, I say forget them and use KDE.
Heavily redesigned KDE 4.0 was alpha state and got a bad reputation but the latest versions are very good!

Linux is a superior development environment at least for Lazarus project in my experience. The whole tool chain works better.
As a small example, Linux caches source files better. When I search for an identifier name in the whole Lazarus sources, it takes (after the initial slow reading) less than 2 seconds in my machine. Yes, it searches all 1.5 million code lines.
On Windows it takes about 10 times as long in the same machine.
I do such searches all the time when learning/developing Lazarus code, so it makes a big difference.

Juha

[JuhaManninen]

Installing grub or any other boot manager changes the MBR. Win7 used to not like this and repair installs were sometimes needed breaking grub again. Before installing any distribution, Google for dual boot Windows 7 and your distribution instructions to minimise the risks.

My experience is that this part works perfectly well with any major Linux distro. I have installed OpenSuse, Mageia, Sabayon, Fedora, Ubuntu and Mint to a machine with Windows 7 and they all added it nicely to the boot loader menu and Windows 7 always booted when the right entry was selected.

With my work machine I was little nervous because the Windows partition had to be resized to get space for a new Linux partition.
Mint installation suggested a sane partition table with a resized Windows partition. I clicked Ok and ... it worked.
The resized Windows partition was added to the boot menu and it booted without problems. It only insisted running a file system check during the first boot which passed without errors.
It is nice to see how far Linux distros have come since 1990's.

I understand that all machine configurations don't work as well. There are too many possible combinations of different hardware to test them all.

Juha

[Ocye]

...so any recommendations?

IMHO your questions are inappropriate for the decision of a distro. There are several other aspects like paket manager, configuration/setup tool, repositories, free/closed source, availability of preferred window manager, community etc. - and a lot of answers: http://distrowatch.com. Have a look for Zorin OS and Xandros, both are designed to be Windows like. But I guess you (and most other Linux users) don't want to have another Windows.

PS: To add my two personal cents: I love my Arch Linux with KDE (but I wouldn't recommend it to a Windows user).

[gato2707]

I think your approach is not appropriate. First, you must check compatibility of your computer. First video card, most of the problems that arise in a Linux, are related to this particular aspect.

Then you must check the other devices that come with your PC, WiFi card, printer, scanner and other similar.

Google is a good ally in your initial search. Once you've narrowed the search, download linux distributions that best fit your hardware. The vast majority of them have a live test medium (livecd or memory stick) and tests before proceeding with the installation.

Regarding the selection of desktop (DM) are all good, but all they are different from Windows. IMHO you should make a major effort to adapt.

Finally, I recommend a distribution that offers support for as long as possible. Linux is not Windows, so you should not expect a version that offers 10 years support in the way that Windows XP does. Most distributions release a new version every six months, and the support for them lasts only 18 months. A LTS Ubuntu or Debian fulfill this aspect. Red Hat offers 10 years of support, but you have to pay for it and it is not a distribution for desktop.

As for the possibility of an installation in a virtual machine, and because surely you will use to perform the programming, I only recommend it if you have your computer resources to emulate powerful hardware, with at least 2 GB of RAM.

[TurboRascal]

I don't see how backup is related to ntfs drivers. If your computer contains important information, back it up regularly on an external or network device and especially before installing anything on it or resizing partitions.
If you are sharing an ntfs drive between linux and windows the risk of something going wrong increases. Be prepared for Win 7 sometimes starting a chkdsk at bootup or linux refusing to mount the ntfs drive because it thinks it wasn't shut down correctly. At least that is my experience with it. If possible use a network drive to share the data.
Also don't forget that ntfs drivers on linux have very limited knowledge of windows ACL which is another risk factor. 

Of course, there could be some issues. On the one hand, I've used an NTFS storage partition for sharing data between my Linux and Windows installations for years with no problem. On the other hand, after not having a Windows install for more then a year and then installing Windows 7, it fired the CHKDSK up on boot and happily cleared the partition  (luckily I had a freshly made complete backup of it) i.e. it deleted all my files!

So, care is advised, but if you regularly boot both OS-es (especially if you use Windows more), I don't expect any problems to happen. Modern NTFS drivers for Linux (specifically NTFS-3G) work very well.

If you don't intend to use Linux for anything else but Lazarus development then I also concur with the idea mentioned several times, namely to install it in a VM. That solves many of the associated problems in exchange of being more awkward for frequent use and requiring more resources (mostly RAM) than dual-boot.

[JuhaManninen]

I think your approach is not appropriate. First, you must check compatibility of your computer. First video card, most of the problems that arise in a Linux, are related to this particular aspect.

Then you must check the other devices that come with your PC, WiFi card, printer, scanner and other similar.

Google is a good ally in your initial search. Once you've narrowed the search, download linux distributions that best fit your hardware. The vast majority of them have a live test medium (livecd or memory stick) and tests before proceeding with the installation.

Yes, liveCD is good for testing the hardware compatibility, but otherwise you try to make this uselessly complicated.
The hardware support determines if you can use Linux at all.
If there is a device driver for a certain gadget, it is typically included in every mainstream distro.
If there is no such device driver then you are in trouble. You will not find it from any distro however much you google.
There are exceptions of course, like a binary driver from a manufacturer which is compiled for one (old) Linux kernel version only, but if you must depend on binary drivers then you are in trouble anyway.

It means you should try one of the main distros first. If something does not work then make more plans.
The only real exception for this rule are old computers and other hardware. "Old" in this case means like 12 years.
Then you need some hacking spirit anyway and my previous advice does not apply.

Finally, I recommend a distribution that offers support for as long as possible. Linux is not Windows, so you should not expect a version that offers 10 years support in the way that Windows XP does. Most distributions release a new version every six months, and the support for them lasts only 18 months. A LTS Ubuntu or Debian fulfill this aspect. Red Hat offers 10 years of support, but you have to pay for it and it is not a distribution for desktop.

Again I disagree, sorry.
Now we are talking about personal development machines. Who cares about 10 years of support for one distro version when you can anytime download and update the latest version. At least I would not want to use a 10 years old version in any situation, they are advancing so rapidly.
Besides, support from different Linux forums is free.

As for the possibility of an installation in a virtual machine, and because surely you will use to perform the programming, I only recommend it if you have your computer resources to emulate powerful hardware, with at least 2 GB of RAM.

The virtual machine does not affect raw CPU speed much but it affects the file cache speed a lot because all file operations end up to Windows.
Fortunately taazz wanted a dual boot instead of virtual machine.
If really Red Hat 3 was the last distro he saw then a modern distro with a desktop system will be a mind-blowing experience.


Juha

[gato2707]

Yes, liveCD is good for testing the hardware compatibility, but otherwise you try to make this uselessly complicated.
The hardware support determines if you can use Linux at all.

This is not entirely accurate. Most LiveCD vg: Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSuse, Mandriva, Mageia, etc.. Do not include any proprietary driver. However once installed, is basically a simple issue to resolve. Clearly this depends on the type of driver involved.

Who cares about 10 years of support for one distro version when you can anytime download and update the latest version

While the issue of the availability of new versions is trivial. It isn't talking about variation in the internal parts of the distribution. Just remember that changing between libc 4 to libc 6 was what turned obsolete Kylix (this without having Borland refused to make the necessary adjustments).

About virtual machines. I do not recommend its use for programming. I think they are a valid alternative as a testing field. I also believe that it is more convenient to install a Windows VM within Linux to test apps, that maded it in the opposite way.

[taazz]

So to recap, in order of appearance rate
1) *buntu derivatives especially ubuntu 10.04 LΤS or Kubuntu 12.04
2) Mint
3) everything else SUSE, FEDORA, MAGEIA,sabayon, Zorin OS, Xandros,
4) Arch. This one is recommended but not to windows users for some reason.

Stay away from unity desktop embrace any kde or gnome desktop.
1) KDE 4 seems to be recommended as a stable Desktop manager.
2) Gnome2 is preferred over 3.

That about covers everything?

How about installation procedures have they changed any in last decade or so or everything is as I remember it text based configuration files with each destro having its own directory tree to place them?

Other pitfalls I should keep my eye on?

And to answer a few questions. My current development computer is an ACER aspire 5310 with 1GB of ram that is why I can't use VMs for linux. When I say compatibility I mean that I should not waste my time running various tools to correct problems on hard drives or loose installed drivers (or blag your favorite pitfall here) in general avoid spending time in support activities or in this case minimize it to under 20 mins per day.

Of course is way to early for me to start installing linux. I have a lot of work to do before I'm ready to boot linux and start working there too. The moment that I install linux I expect to spend most of my developing time in linux and only boot in windows once a day to check emails fill in daily reports etc.
I'm trying to make a list with the most promising candidates so I can spend some time researching the process. As for the backups I'm already trying to find space for that but as always I might overlook something.

I'm not a fun of constant updates. when I install a linux distribution I will stick with it for a long time updates will be done once every 6 months or so and only security updates will be installed for sure everything else will be considered if time permits.

thank you everyone for your input I have something to start my research.

[BigChimp]

How about installation procedures have they changed any in last decade or so or everything is as I remember it text based configuration files with each destro having its own directory tree to place them?

A lot more graphical installers. Many distros (all?) support the FHS standard, but that "standard" still offers choice in where to put files. So yes, I think there are still differences between the distros. (Also regarding package names etc.

No pitfalls I can think of except do things methodically - as you describe doing.