[dundee] regarding the webtrust talk last night

[Jonathan Riddell]

On Wed, Jan 14, 2004 at 10:10:58AM +0000, angie at nirvana.me.uk wrote:

> Tayside Recyclers refurnish and sell on 2nd hand PCs (usually old basic 
> machines - typically P2s). At the moment they give them out in what state they 
> came in i.e. usually with Windows on them, though technically they are suposed 
> to wipe them. AFAIK they don't give out copies of the disks so if Windows 
> messes up tough luck for the customers!
>  
> As well as preventing them from possible problems with F.A.S.T. (assuming it's 
> still going) this would mean they were giving out a consistent O.S. (not sure 
> if they currently provide support for the machines) that would cope better on 
> the older hardware than Windows, be less prone to e-mail viruses etc.. It would 
> also be better for their customers to get a disk rather than finding in a month 
> or two's time Windows has messed up and there's no easy way for them to fix it.
>  
> Anyway to the poimt - perhaps the group could argue over the most suitable 
> Linux for this job (though not for too long) and then come up with a cd image 
> for it alongside a few essentials for the home user e.g. OpenOffice and a 
> familiar looking mail client/web browser - Mozilla perhaps. 

Sounds like an excellent idea.

Choosing a distribution is ticky because they all have their good
points and bad points.  I'd suggest Mandrake because it's got a
repution as being easy to use and install, they release everything
they do as Free Software and it's available for download at no cost.

However I tried it today and it just seems buggy, it wouldn't
talk to my CD drive and the graphics drivers had strange problems.
The MandakeMove Live CD didn't work, possibly because of a burn burn
(twice).

I guess the other possibilities are Knoppix (easy to customise, not
terribly easy to install), SuSE (hmm, non-Free) and maybe Fedora
(never tried it).

Anyone had better luck with Mandrake/MandrakeMove?

Jonathan