[Lancaster] Re: Install Fest

[Matt S Trout]

On Sun, Sep 04, 2005 at 11:37:56AM +0100, Martyn Welch wrote:
> As far as distros are concerned I'm in favour of sticking to the following 
> ones (unless someone asks specifically for something else) for beginners, in 
> alphabetical order :-):
> 
> Mandrake
> SuSE
> Ubuntu 

If the hardware will take them, then that's my vote as well; see up-thread.

I'd also note that PCLinuxOS is quite a promising installable live CD which
appears to be trying to do an Ubuntu on Mandrake; my dad's rather enjoying
his dual-boot install thereof as well. But the three mentioned above are
probably still the smart choices on relatively modern hardware.
 
> I have other distributions lying around, but since we as a LUG will probably 
> end up a the first port of call to answer problems, then it doesn't make 
> sense to install distributions we are not familiar with.

Aye, and I'm *very* familiar with Slack and derived distributions and I'm
happy to help people out with them - and between myself, my SO and a good
friend of mine we collectively have about 12 years' experience with it, and
I can easily tap them for help if I'm stuck.

Broadband is helpful for downloading packages; dial-up is quite sufficient for
asking for help on a mailing list. My SO only had dial-up for most of her
time as a Slack user, and was even able to download additional software
without trouble due to wget's ability to resume downloads and the non-bloated
nature of much of the software involved.

> I'd just like to add that we will only have a few hours - so there is no point 
> in trying to install anything on old hardware that needs a lot of manual 
> configuration...

And VectorLinux has a reputation for going onto such old hardware *without*
a lot of manual configuration - so my thought was that it was maybe worth
a try on such hardware, rather than simply saying "we're not going to try
at all" ...

-- 
     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

 + Help us build a better perl ORM: http://dbix-class.shadowcatsystems.co.uk/ +