[Nottingham] Best distribution with apt for a newbie?

Martin martin at ml1.co.uk
Mon Feb 2 16:16:27 GMT 2004


David Bean wrote:
> On Mon, 2004-02-02 at 13:07, Martin wrote: 
[...]
> 
>>Mandrake 9.2 - GNU - Linux
> 
> 
> <RANT>
> In the last week I installed Mandrake 9.2 as a desktop system,
> installing nearly everything (except server stuff, apache etc). I
> selected the standard level of security, and install went smoothly,
> except it incorrectly was my solaris partition as swap, but fortunately
> did not format it (Solaris x86 has the same partition number as linux
> swap).

That's a _LOT_ of stuff to install!

...And the DiskDrake utility is perfectly reasonable in identifying an 
existing swap partition and making use of it. You can tell it to use a 
different partition if you wish.

So far so good.


> The first thing I did was go to the updates, to download all the patches
> to the OS. 269Mb to download. This was a lot but probably about the same
> as XP, so I went to play an audio CD. No luck (permissions). 

To be expected if you've installed everything. There's a lot of updates 
to various packages/apps (aswell as Mandrake specific stuff) that 
Mandrake keeps up to date with. Part of the penalty (fun) of being on 
the "bleeding edge" of all the new stuff.


> Its not aimed at a particular techie market, so I would expect a CD
> player to work straight off. I left to computer to download the updates,
> then rebooted back into Debian. I'll probably not use Mandrake for a
> while.

MMmmmm... If the only thing not 'working' is playing CD music, then 
that's pretty good for a new install.

Note that Mandrake sets the default volume to be zero! Just start up one 
of the many mixer/volume apps and turn up your sound card volume.

There's lots of web help if you've got permissions problems or other 
esoteric stuff. There can be confusion with some drives about ide/scsi, 
or what the drive is recognised as if it is a dvd/cd 'combo' writer drive.

Sounds like a good start.


> I moved to Debian after using Redhat which I liked, but found that once
> I got going I was much happier with Debian. I find debian a little slow,
> compared to a more optimised distro (gentoo, LFS), however I've been
> experimenting with the 2.6 kernel, and it's remarkebly faster.

Welcome to Linux and real computing!


> </RANT>
???


Have fun,
Martin


-- 
----------------
Martin Lomas
martin at ml1.co.uk
----------------




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