Linux advice for a gfx studio

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Hi guys,
I see that many of you use linux for blender work. I am curious to make the switch but would love some input of which distro I shoult go with.
Recently I installed Ubuntu on two machines but GRUB did not boot my laptop install (the reason might have been that I didn’t use partition magic to set up my HD) and the first experience went bad … now, a few days later I’m willing to give this a second try.

I am hopeful for the release of UbuntuStudio sometime in April but in the meantime, it would be great if I could get a headstart using Blender with Linux.
Please note that this post has nothing to do with Vista or XP and the only reason I’m asking is that some of you have a lot of experience and therefore your oppinion would be of great value to me.
Is the latest release of GIMP 2.3? stable for professional work (texturing & decal stuff) and what about Jahshaka?

Thanks for your input :slight_smile:

P.S. The machine I wasn’t able to install Linux at all onto is an HP Media Center PC m 7640 n
The specs are:
AMD X2 5000+
SATA HD (320 GIG)
2 GIG RAM
Geforce 7600
Lightscribe DVD burner

The Laptop is a Toshiba Qosmio G10 (17 inch screen model)
2 hard drives (60 and 40 GIG)
1 GIG RAM
GeForce FX Go5700

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Is the latest release of GIMP 2.3? stable for professional work (texturing & decal stuff)

Yes, it’s awesome. 2.3 is really far along, and has come a long way from 2.2.

and what about Jahshaka?

Meh. I’ve never heard of anyone getting anywhere with Jahshaka.Cinelerra / Kdenlive + Gimp + Blender is a pretty good set of core apps.

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Thnaks knellotron,
I’m glad to hear about GIMP as we will be using it instead of PS

While I was waiting for answer(s), I found something interesting called “PC-BSD”. Are any of you using this and if yes, what do you think about it. Our studio works with large files and movies so we would love to have a reliable network.
As a side note, xp is performing poor for us and if it wasn’t for fire wire networking, we’d be in bad shape.

I like pc bsd and if I hear good things about it from users here, I’ll give it a spin.

Forgot to list the renderfarm machines
Intel 2.8Ghz (multithreading)
1.5 GIG RAM
ATI Radeon 9600 GFX cards

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PC-BSD is based on BSD which means it should be very stable & reliable. However BSD is usually used for servers, so I don’t know how well it would work out in a graphic studio unless you where using it as a network server to link all your machines together.

I’d suggest trying out SuSe if Ubuntu fails. Some find SuSe as a better installation interface than Ubuntu’s.