[Falkirk] next meeting

[Nick Hockings - FreeNET Africa]

On Sun, 16 Mar 2003 Jonathan Riddell <jr@jriddell.org> wrote :

> On Sun, 16 Mar 2003, kemal wrote:
> 
> > Hi Nick i also have broadband so can download iso helpw ith insatll 
appr as i have never used debian before how does it compare to mandrake?
> 
> Debian doesn't give you any help at all in setting up X, and not much 
help in setting up anything else for that matter.
> 
> Mandrake tries to help, but in my experience gets it wrong more often 
than not.

Debian Woody aka 3.0 (ie the current stable) does help a fair amount even 
with X. (Super-probe is availale during X configuration, and your hardware 
options are presented as menus. The graphics of the install program are 
guaranteed to work on terminals, and so are plug ugly. Once X is installed 
it is a pretty as X always is.)

It is best if you have all you hardware documentation to hand, you can 
also extract quite a bit of info browsing an M$ installation. A good place 
to get an XF86config that you know will work is to copy it from a live-CD 
distro eg DemoLinux or Knoppix, both of which are Debian based.

One way of installing a Debian variant is to install eg Knoppix and then 
add any extra apps from your favourite Debian apt-proxy. This makes 
workstation functionality very easy to set up. (If only it would deal with 
my Alcatel!) 

I have a recent copy of Knoppix from UKUUG I'll bring along. (Nice 100% 
free software :-)

-- 
Nick Hockings
nick@freenetafrica.org