[Lancaster] Help me select a distrob

[Tony Ayre]

> On Thu, 2006-04-20 at 17:29 +0100, Ken Hough wrote:
>> Clair wrote:
> <snip>
>>> By the wizards, I meant YAST. I once put SuSE on a 300MHz box,  
>>> and had to use
>>> YAST. Paaaaiiinnn.....
>>
>> It will run OK on a 300 MHz box given sufficient memory (at least  
>> 128MB,
>> but better with 256MB). I run SuSE v9.1 on a couple of Athlon boxes,
>> each with 512MB of RAM, and an 800MHz PIII laptop with 384MB of RAM.
>
> I've run SUSE 10 on a dual processor 600Mhz Pentium III box with  
> 256MB,
> and I'm now running Ubuntu 5.10 on the same computer, and the increase
> of speed is *very* noticable (and yes, both processors were in use  
> both
> times, before you ask :-) ) It's like a different computer - much more
> responsive, and programs load a lot faster. (OpenOffice Writer, for
> instance, takes about 10 seconds to load, as opposed to about 35  
> seconds
> in SUSE). And yes, YAST was slooooow... It also boots a lot faster.
> (Yes, I'm one of those weird people who likes to switch his  
> computer off
> from time to time...)

I have had the same experience. I tried out the following on a 1Ghz  
Via laptop with 256Mb ram (all using default installs):

SUSE 10
Mandriva 2005
Fedora Core 3
Ubuntu 5.04 (and since then 5.10 and 6.06)

The slowest ( to install, and configure) was SuSE - It took around 2  
hours to install. Yast was also the slowest control panel, but when  
it was working it was excellent - fully featured (although I don't  
like having to *have* to use it for things).
Mandriva was the next slowest - taking just over an hour. The control  
panel was ok but is very unstable, crashing and the like quite often.
Fedora Core was next at just under an hour. It didn't really have  
what I'd call a control panel but it did cover some parts of config  
with graphical tools. But then again, I don't like the altered  
versions of KDE and GNOME it ships with.
Ubuntu was the quickest, taking just over half an hour from inserting  
the disc to having a completely working system. (except multimedia  
support which took another 10 minutes to configure). Back at 5.04 the  
configuration tools were primitive and buggy. Now they are very good,  
with 99% of the bugs removed. Kubuntu has an excellent all in one  
control panel which works well.

At some point, I will work through a selection of current distros and  
report on them on my website... Looking at various things and grading  
them. Hopefully, I won't be biased - I like to use what works and has  
a good community.

Cheers
Tony