[Glastonbury] Mini install fest on my laptop

[Andrew M.A. Cater]

On Wed, Feb 09, 2005 at 12:07:33PM +0000, Greg Browne wrote:
> Anyone dare to stick their necks out into the flames, and say why the
> popularity of come and the decline of others?
> 
I've seen lots of distributions come and go in the last eleven years :)

Most of them were Red Hat clones of one sort or another: one or two 
were Debian based and a few were there own animal.  Most distributions
fail because of lack of updates/lack of support/lack of a (commercial)
business model or niche in the market. For example: Corel started out 
with great hopes and ended with a sell out to form Xandros. Stormix was 
a tiny Canadian company with a well packaged Debian and some innovative
firewall ideas.

As far as the current crop goes:

Ubuntu: very well packaged distribution. Up to date with Debian. May
eventually fork from Debian because of speed of change.  Released every
six months maximum. Runs on major (commercial) architectures Intel/AMD/
PowerPC. No one is yet sure about their business model and how it may
work.  Committed to free software. Primarily GNOME desktop based.
Pretty installer.

Mepis: one man's fork of Debian to make it easy to install.  KDE based.
Not necessarily as current as Ubuntu. I've just bought the Prentice Hall
"Point and Click Linux" book - Mepis is about as P&C as you can get.
Commercial package repository: only slightly obsolete versions available
for free download apparently.

Knoppix - one man's distribution for himself which happened to spark a 
small revolution. Good collection of software: well packaged live CD.
There is now a Free Knoppix - hosted by the same man who hosts
ftp.debian.org - stripped of any commercial add-ins like Adobe Acrobat.
When it works its awesome: _needs_ memory. Based on a mix of Debian
testing and unstable as far as I can see.

Kanotix - as per Knoppix but based on Debian unstable. Some useful hacks
like memtest86 as a boot option.

Debian - what all the others aspire to be :) Slightly stuffy/obstreporous/
geeky developer crowd - but a centre of technical excellence in general.
Largest coherent package repository of any distribution anywhere AFAICS.
Several times, when I've needed Free Software for Solaris boxes at work,
the only place I've been able to find sources is Debian. Old style
installer was hell: new style installer much more straightforward.
Slow to release - but DD's do a hell of a lot of testing.  "Woody/stable" 
was released two and a half years ago but has had four distribution 
revisions to incorporate security fixes/errata in that time, the last
on Jan 1st this year. "Sarge/testing" will become stable Real Soon Now. 
[Disclaimer: I am a Debian developer of five years standing or so]

Gentoo - for people who care about the difference between -02 -03 and
-Os in gcc options.  Useful if you have a lot of time to wait for your
"emerge XFree86" or whatever.

Slackware - all things to all men. Up to date software - 10.1 was
released this week. A purists/enthusiasts distribution. Will work in
4M of memory :)

Fedora - <bias> bleeding edge software with no coherent support - the 
standard advice in case of problems is "update everything" or so it seems.
</bias>

The key to all the Debian-based distributions is coherent package
policies and structures - that, and the amazing range of software
available for free, are the prime reasons to run Debian. All the
distributions are equally useful to somebody - discussion of 
distribution issues quickly turns to flamewars if you're not careful -
and in distributions, as in life, there is no Holy Grail (whether at Rennes
/the Louvre/Chalice Well/in the Parsifal legend :) )

Just my 0.02 Euro cents,

Andy

[Co-maintainer (with Martin Wheeler) of the Linux Distributions in
English HOWTO]
> I've avoided Ubuntu because 
> a) it is a 3 cd download 
> b) I understood that it is based on older packages (maybe that's a
> good point from a stability point of view but I just want something
> that does the biz? MEPIS does for me but I am hitting some install
> issues)
> 
> Greg
> 
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