[Lancaster] Freespire impressions

[Ken Hough]

John Scott wrote:

> Hi Ken
>
> Before you install Ubuntu again, give Mepis a try. I was pleasantly 
> surprised at how user friendly and quick it is *Boot and run. Im 
> running a P3 850 with 128MB Ram and it runs like a dream. Device 
> support is great, the forum is active and the people very helpful and 
> Im not moving away from it in the foreseeable future.
>
> The single disk download is a live cd, with a Install Me link on the 
> desktop. Even the Live CD worked quite quickly on my machine. This is 
> the only small footprint Linux other than DSL that I have tried and It 
> outweighs all other distro's I tried. I have also attempted Ubuntu 
> 6.06 and Suse 10.1 and was disappointed with performace in both 
> instances.

I use SuSE v10.1 on my IBM Thinkpad T21 (800MHz PIII with 384MB of RAM) 
and it works well, even with heavyweight apps like Kstars and Gimp. SuSE 
does need a bit of RAM to perform well with 256MB being the recommended 
minimum. On my desktop PC (Athlon 2200XP with 512MB of RAM) it flies!

SuSE v10.1 can be speeded up by disabling some unneccessary (for most 
usage) background apps.
For starters, try:    'rpm -e zmd rug zen-updater'.

The likes of Ubuntu, SuSE, Fedora, etc are all pretty good these days, 
but they are different. For this reason, I suggest that you will have 
more success by sticking with one distro and getting to know it. SuSE is 
my distro of choice. I now know it fairly well, so it works for me.

I do play with other distros, but probably because I am not so familiar 
with them, they sometimes give me problems.

Ken Hough