[Lancaster] Recommissioning of PCs

[Martyn Welch]

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OK,

Sorry it has taken me so long to reply, been a little snowed under.

I hope this email doesn't sound like to much of a bash, I really appreciate 
the amount of time you must have put in to getting the machines to the state 
they are in now. Remind me to buy you a beer or something sometime.

- ----- Original Message ----------
On Friday 30 April 2004 15:55, Ken Hough wrote:

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

Cheers.

> 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.
>

They seem quite good, but I haven't used them heavily. The good side of it is 
the company ploughs some money into Open Source.

> 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.
>

Yup, that's about the size of it (especially from an installation point of 
view). I'd just lie to say that it is a little easier than Linux from Scratch 
or Gentoo...

> 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.
>

I think that has more to do about commercial support. HP & IBM need to use 
software where commercial support is available for Line managers to accept 
it...

My main worry about Debian is that the default install still seems to be using 
the 2.2.x kernel tree!

> 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.
>

That was one of the main reasons of using Debian. We wanted to only use about 
half the HD. Most of the drives were partitioned as [~500Mb, ~50Mb?, ~500Mb] 
the aim was to be able to store a copy of a good install on the third 
partition unmounted, that could be re-written over the primary partition if 
the computer was mangled by someone.

> 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.
>

This was another reason for the Debian choice, most of the comfiguration cat 
be done from the command line (can yast be driven soully from the command 
line?)

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

There are a couple of other reasons I can think of:

Updates - Due to it's community base, the security/ bug-fix updates are free 
and easy to install. Debian also handles upgrades remarkably well as far as I 
know.

Simplicity - Many of the big distributions add a lot of glue scripting, 
frequently to the point where the packages can no longer be hand configured. 
I agree that something like Suse's YAST or Mandrake's Control Center saves a 
lot of time and is great for use on my home box, however I was viewing the 
LUG systems as more of a learning experience.

Security - The aim was not to have anymore than the minimum number of packages 
installed, this arguably makes it harder to compromise, but it does speed us 
updating (less packages to update) and by making the boxes near impossible to 
log into locally they should remain in working condition for longer (unless 
someone decides to reinstall something else over them :o( ).

> 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
>

Once again, cheers for all the hard work. For now, software wise, anything 
working is a bonus and the percentage of the hardware you have resurrected is 
stunning.

Martyn

>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Lancaster mailing list
> Lancaster at mailman.lug.org.uk
> http://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/lancaster

- -- 
Martyn Welch (welchm at comp.lancs.ac.uk)

PGP Key : http://ubicomp.lancs.ac.uk/~martyn/pgpkey.html
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