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I'm a sucker for trying new Linux distributions, so I downloaded the DVD for (Foresight Linux and installed it. It looks like it's based on Fedora, at least it uses the same installation program. It looks good, and seems to be stable. However it also seems to suffer the same problem that Fedora does on my system; namely speed. For some reason it's slower than other distros, such as Ubuntu. As an example, and this may be down to my system, when there's any reasonable disk activity, or say I'm loading a new page in Firefox, the mouse stutters and the machine is non-responsive. I have a SATA 200Gb drive, so one would assume it's not a hardware issue. I'm starting to think I have something mis-configured inside the box somewhere.

The package manager, Conary, seems to have roots in RPM (written by an original developer of RPM) and while I find it faster than RPM and Yum, it definitely seems slower than Ubuntu's apt-get. The package repository is somewhat unreliable, one install was coming down the pipe at 500k/s while others timed out. I installed the NVIDIA drivers, which involved editing the xorg.conf to get the "fancy desktop stuff", but there's no graphical front end to Conary, so it involves pasting commands into the console. Overall it's a good distro, but I'm tempted to try Mint Linux, which is based on Ubuntu.

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