[cumbria_lug] New distro advice

[Roger Cope]

Humm. Well, I'm glad I started this all off...

As those in this list who know me know, I am more than capable of running a
system from a command line. My octal is still good and my knowledge of Edlin
is second only to, er, Ed.

But life's too short and hardware is too cheap.

Of _course_ I run a windowing environment on my servers. Why would you not?
In fact, if you include Webmin, VNC and local access I run at least three
regularly and since my Linux choice is good, they all run just fine.

It's XP on my client and that runs just fine too.

The point I was making in my original post was that what I'm after in this
fine balancing act that is a modern day operating system is that it _does
not_ fall over. When I use any of my choice of GUIs or drop into a command
line, or use a control panel app or stick a tape in a tape drive I _expect_
the thing to stay up and work. Hell, even Windows stays up most of the time
and works reasonably frequently.

Mandrake, Slackware and the like all fall over (in my experience). Debian
doesn't have half the useful software 'cos it's distributed by fanatics. The
on-line distros... Well, who's got the time? SuSE stays up but half the RPMs
fail to install and RedHat is too expensive. For now, it looks like Fedora
is a good choice.

Gnome, KDE? Well a choice from two is not bad. It'd be nice to have
OpenOffice running faster and it'd be nice to have Java support in a browser
without building the thing practically from scratch. I don't mind any of
that on a server. Doing it on a client is no fun and doing it on 10,000+
clients in a corporation is a real job of work.

What I _really_ need to do is finish editing my holiday video so my parents
believe I really went away for a month last May. Tough enough on Windows but
on Linux still a non starter. At least Windows doesn't fall over when I turn
the firewire camcorder on...

Now for a bacon sandwich...

Roj