Good question.
I just got through trying ALL the BDI's.
The most popular/widely used is the BDI 2.18/2.22 series based on Red Hat 6.2. I've got newer computers (homebuilt) particularly with Nvidia Geforce 4 TI 4400, and my older one has a Geforce DDR. Neither of these 'newer' video cards are detected worth a darn. I was stuck running 640 X 480 @ 8bit color, not usable at all. An older 16MB video card or less should be supported ok, but I didn't have any older ones to try. Red Hat 6.2 is older also, and the KDE destop is limited as well. For example, scrolling with a wheel mouse doesn't work at all.
The BDI TNG is a newer version based on Red Hat 7. The newer Red Hat brings much better hardware support, a slicker, more functional KDE destop etc.. Supposedly this was an experimental version that they gave up on and don't upgrade anymore. I had pretty decent luck with it hardware wise. EMC ran fine too, I did have some parport config probs, but I had the same problems in ANY version of EMC.
Finally there is the BDI Live versions. These are based on Morphix, which I guess is a live version of Debian. Live means that you boot from the CD and the OS loads, without copying anything to you HD. You can use the 'net, EMC etc. without ever installing it. However, it's a pain to work with since the config files are on the CD and not your HD. You have the option to install to HD. The OS is the most up to date of any of the BDI's and thus will like newer hardware the best. EMC runs fine. The biggest down side is that the OS is stripped down for size to fit on one CD. So alot of the extra apps/development tools etc... are not installed.  |