Five different linuxes over five days

A few months ago I went and purchased a hard drive for around $60. My wife had been bugging me to install Linux on her computer. I, like an idiot, went out and purchased a second hard drive for her. I say 'like an idiot' because I was lazy and did not check to see if it was IDE or Sata. (To be honest I could not see it being Sata, so why check?)

Long story short, I ended up with an extra hard drive. So I installed it into my workshop computer.

Installing Mint on my wife's computer went perfectly first time. Installing Linux on the workshop computer however, was another story.



First Install
Mythbuntu - I thought, great, I like to watch podcasts. I have a tuner card. I can watch TV or Podcasts while working on my various projects. The Mythbuntu install felt like an Ubuntu install and installed quite fast. However I was disappointed that my video card was not one of the ones that could be recognized. At that point, I knew that it probably not stay. I played with it for several hours and found that there were a lot of broken links (not their fault). I was not impressed. I thought it would do more. Removed.

Second Install
openSuse - Well, it did not like something and would not install. No time. Removed.

Third Install
Mandriva 2008.1 - It recognized my tuner card (90% - It knew it was there but I could not tune to anything except white noise station). Not enough time to test more - I need a better antenna. I actually liked this distro. I found that Mandravia 2009.1 was released the same weekend. I have done this before where I got the disks and spent time on the installation of a Linux only to discover that it was almost immediately out of date. Removed.

Fourth Install.
Mint Linux - I had a small issue here. I partitioned the drive so I could boot more than one Linux. At this point I found I had made a mistake and I did not get a boot menu like when dual booting Windows. I could see the Mandriva install but needed to run repair to access it. So I did, but then the reverse happened and it would boot Mandriva but not Mint. Mint could see my tuner card though. Removed.

Fifth install.
Ubuntu Hardy Heron - I repartitioned my disk to take different distros together and installed Ubuntu. Reinstalled Mandriva. I now have the boot menu choice. Ubuntu, however, did not recognize my tuner card.

Verdict - I think I will now revisit the Mandriva 2009.1 distro and I think I will add it to my Eee PC when I have a chance.
Mint Linux Elyssa is on my main desktop and even though it has some great features it has been a bit disappointing. I have several applications that I use that seem to actually crash. This probably is hardware related. But I never had issues with Cassandra.
My wife has been booting into Mint all the time and loves it. The only issue she has had is that flash does not always play.