[cumbria_lug] New distro advice

[Ian Linwood]

Hello Roger,

Monday, February 23, 2004, 10:45:54 PM, you wrote:

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

Oh, I thought is was Russ Phillips that was the OP.

RC> As those in this list who know me know, I am more than capable of running a
RC> system from a command line.

[snip some nonsense, and please don't mention MUMPS again
*yawn*]

RC> Mandrake, Slackware and the like all fall over (in my experience).

Well talk about contradicting yourself. Capable but unable to make a
stable OS stable.

I cannot comment on Mandrake (apart from them not liking LG CDROMs)
But as for Slackware, you must be joking. _The _ most sensible and
stable distro. Unless you are trolling, I would suspect you have a
hardware problem if you have stability problems with Slackware.
Could you detail what problems you were having?

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

Yes, for Linux to take off seriously on the DT, there NEEDS to be a
defacto standard, easy to install GUI.

As for rolling out an image to a large number of clients, or even
updating client images, this is a simple job in Linux, regardless of
the complication of the setup.  Crickey, Sun have been doing this kind
of stuff for many a year.

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

You make your video for your parents in Windows...I'm sure your
parents will be thrilled with it.

At least my Slackware install hasn't fallen over _ever_.

Talking of which...I visited someone for whom I had set up a Slackware
Server the other day. This is a PDC (running Samba obviously), web
server, PostgreSQL server, LDAP, mail server (local and using
fetchmail to their ISP), firewall, pppd, squid proxy, and backs up to
ext DLT. I queried the 211 day uptime..."Oh, we had a power cut"...
they didn't want to pay for a UPS. The server came up within 5 min of
the power coming back, they didn't feel the need to call me.

Ah, bless  :-)
-- 
Best regards,
 Ian