[cumbria_lug] New distro advice

[Roger Cope]

Hi,

I will add my vote for Fedora Core, but version 2 not 1. Now that I've been
converted by RedHat from wetware to abandonware I have to move off RedHat
for my server system and have been looking around for alternatives. Only
Novell/SuSE offer the same level of support that I previously got from
RedHat and I've always found rough edges on SuSE in the past. In any case, I
suspect that Novell is only interested in corporate users too.

That leaves all of the 'unsupported' distributions and having tried several
in the past I have only ever come across two that worked (from the user
point of view) all the way down to the metal 'out of the box'. Too many
distro look good but have broken links on the menu system or incomplete on
line documentation or other trivial problems that are fine when you're
experimenting on a desktop but get in the way of real work.

The two that 'just worked' were the much late lamented Corel Linux and
RedHat. Not having tried Xandros and since it is really a desktop Linux, I
am going to move to Fedora Core 2 when it is released. I want core 2 because
it is supposed to provide better kernel performance than core 1 and my
server is currently only just acceptable under RedHat 9 and also because
several of the tools I am interested in only join Fedora at core 2 (like
Mondo).

In the meantime, I have just realised that the black box that I have been
using as a doorstop is actually a working laptop, which gives me a spare
machine to put Fedora Core 1 on. Might do that this weekend...

Roj