[Lancaster] Re: Install Fest

[Matt S Trout]

On Sat, Sep 03, 2005 at 05:22:04PM +0100, Ken Hough wrote:
> >Right. Hence why I'm advocating one that (1) has lots of packages, (2) an
> >active user community, (3) can install RPM,SLP,DEB and TGZ packages out of
> >the box, and (4) actually runs nicely on old hardware. Fedora Core and its
> >ilk fail on (3) and (4), and IMO fail on (1) if you expect the packages to
> >actually work - and the Fedora "community" tends to mostly be a bunch of
> >idiots; the people with clue tend to migrate to a useful distro as fast
> >as their fdisk can carry them ...
> 
> I come back to my point about sticking to mainstream stuff for this 
> event. Maybe I've got my head stuck in the sand, but I hadn't heard much 
> about of 'VectorLinux'. What chance a 'newbie' trying to find help?

Erm. Assuming you teach a newbie to use google, not bad. Plus if it's
Slack-based, it'll behave like unix. This means that general unix-y solutions
to problems will often work. My SO got her start on Linux using Slackware,
and has been using it happily all the way along. Her only problem was asking
questions and getting twelve "use SuSE/FC/whatever, it's easier and you get
a GUI" answers when she actually wanted the real solution.

Newbies are only scared of command lines because people teach them to be
scared of them. My gran can't make head nor tail of a windows desktop but
I was able to explain what

ps ax | grep foo | grep -v grep | awk '{print $1}' | xargs kill

meant in about ten minutes.
 
> Too many offbeat/esoteric packages could be counterproductive.

But the ability to install RPMs means they can still access the host of
RPM-based software out there.

> Given that most people will want to run a GUI, then the hardware must 
> have a bit of clout. True, most (GUI) things can be made to run on old 
> hardware (eg 486's), but not at a sensibly fast rate. Not even with 
> lightweight windows managers like 'icewm'. I have experimented along 
> these lines. Realistically, we are talking Pentiums or better and with 
> at least 128MB RAM.
> 
> It's time that I dropped in another plug for SUSE. It does work and it 
> seems that a good proportion of recent articles in the mags refer to 
> SuSE. This would be very helpful for 'newbies'. YAST must now be by far 
> the best integrated and user friendly installation/configuration/on-line 
> update tool available! (That's bound to get up the noses of Debian users).

YaST is good. YaST is very good. If you're going to go with an RPM-based
distro, SuSE is IMO probably the best choice.

> >See http://www.madpenguin.org/cms/?m=show&id=4966 for a review. The
> >important bit here is that it runs *fast* and *pretty* on old hardware,
> >which at the very least makes it a candidate for older machines. And nobody
> >objected to Ubuntu, which hasn't been around nearly as long and I suspect
> >still isn't as efficient.
> 
> Here's one who's not over impressed with UBUNTU.

*shrug* I haven't tried it myself.

-- 
     Matt S Trout       Specialists in perl consulting, web development, and
  Technical Director    UNIX/Linux systems architecture and automation. Mail
Shadowcat Systems Ltd.  mst (at) shadowcatsystems.co.uk for more information

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