[Lancaster] Re: Install Fest

[Ken Hough]

Matt S Trout wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 03, 2005 at 03:58:35PM +0100, Ken Hough wrote:
> 
>>>One that *is* well worth considering is VectorLinux, a desktop-oriented
>>>Slack-derived distro whose latest release has gorgeous KDE and Gnome 
>>>desktops
>>>and a mostly-working preview of the new e17 Enlightenment release.
>>>
>>
>>Hang on a minute! We're doing installations for supposedly 'newbies'. 
>>Shouldn't we stick to mainstream user friendly distros so that they can 
>>more easily find help after we have gone?
> 
> 
> Right. Hence why I'm advocating one that (1) has lots of packages, (2) an
> active user community, (3) can install RPM,SLP,DEB and TGZ packages out of
> the box, and (4) actually runs nicely on old hardware. Fedora Core and its
> ilk fail on (3) and (4), and IMO fail on (1) if you expect the packages to
> actually work - and the Fedora "community" tends to mostly be a bunch of
> idiots; the people with clue tend to migrate to a useful distro as fast
> as their fdisk can carry them ...

I come back to my point about sticking to mainstream stuff for this 
event. Maybe I've got my head stuck in the sand, but I hadn't heard much 
about of 'VectorLinux'. What chance a 'newbie' trying to find help?

Too many offbeat/esoteric packages could be counterproductive.

Given that most people will want to run a GUI, then the hardware must 
have a bit of clout. True, most (GUI) things can be made to run on old 
hardware (eg 486's), but not at a sensibly fast rate. Not even with 
lightweight windows managers like 'icewm'. I have experimented along 
these lines. Realistically, we are talking Pentiums or better and with 
at least 128MB RAM.

It's time that I dropped in another plug for SUSE. It does work and it 
seems that a good proportion of recent articles in the mags refer to 
SuSE. This would be very helpful for 'newbies'. YAST must now be by far 
the best integrated and user friendly installation/configuration/on-line 
update tool available! (That's bound to get up the noses of Debian users).

> See http://www.madpenguin.org/cms/?m=show&id=4966 for a review. The
> important bit here is that it runs *fast* and *pretty* on old hardware,
> which at the very least makes it a candidate for older machines. And nobody
> objected to Ubuntu, which hasn't been around nearly as long and I suspect
> still isn't as efficient.
> 

Here's one who's not over impressed with UBUNTU.


Ken Hough