[Lancaster] Recommissioning of PCs

[Ken Hough]

Martyn,

As requested, I've resent previous message to LUG mail box.

I'm having problems at present with my original ISP, Compuserve. They 
dumped me off, claiming that a request for payment had not been 
honoured. Not true. Problem now is that they have not re-enabled POP3 
access, so I have to fire up MS win98, etc to get at it.

uklinux.net seems a better bet, but at peak times I can't always get 
into my mail box. Enough of that.

Debian! I know that you are keen on Debian and that Debian has a very 
good reputation. Because of this, I've spent some time trying to get to 
know it(v3.0 Woody). Of all the distros that I've tried, I find it the 
least friendly, most inconvenient and least rewarding.

Debian's big claim to fame in the past was it's superior stability. I 
really doubt that this is still the case, bearing in mind that the likes 
of IBM and HP have opted for alternatives.

If fitting an installation into a small space is a priority, then maybe 
Debian is the choice. Even so, a minimal installation with X (excluding 
the likes of KDE) can be around half a gig with SusE, etc. Hard disc 
space is not a problem today.

RAM might be a problem on old PCs as YAST is a bit of a hog. Given 32MB 
of RAM and swap space, which we will have on all of the PCs at the 
Folly, the benefits of YAST are, I believe, worthwhile.

I look forward to seeing your comments from a pro Debian point of view.

SuSE (Novell) have announced the release of v9.1 at end of April (v2.6.x 
kernel and KDE3.2 with both 32 AND 64 bit versions). I've already 
ordered my copy. I just need Father Christmas to bring me some 64 bit 
hardware. Fat chance!

Regards

Ken Hough