[SWLUG] My Trials and Tribulations....

[Lyn David Thomas]

Well as promised (or threatened depending on your point of view) a 
brief account of my brief excursions in the world of linux (TM), and 
a plea for some help.

My home machine is a fairly ancient low end pentium, originally a 
P75, now with a 133MHz CPU, a spare 2 Gig Hard Drive and 96MB 
RAM, a S3 Vision 968 pci 2MB graphics card.

I have experimented with a number of different distributions, all have 
their plus points, and some minus points.  

Included in my experiments have been, Mandrake (8.1, 8.2), Red 
Hat (7.3), Vector Linux (2, 2.5), Lycoris (Redmond Linux), Best 
Linux 2000 R3.

With Mandrake 8.2 and Red Hat 7.3 I have been unable to get X 
Windows up and running, 8.1 takes for ever to load (around 15 
minutes), even when using a minimal window manager.  Lycoris 
has a nasty bug that causes the system to lock up totally at some 
undetermined point when reading data from a CD (be it a Data CD 
or a Music CD).  Best Linux is a rather old distribution and come 
with a very old version of KDE. 

With the limited capabilities of my current machine I think I am 
best with a limited distribution - limited in the size of the packages 
to be installed and limited in terms of window managers, something 
light would seem to be called for.  Lycoris was quite good in that, 
its start up time seemed quite short in comparison with Mandrake, 
something I think to do with its heavily customised version of KDE - 
though it really does better on a machine that has at least a 
400MHz processor.

I quite liked Vector Linux, a very economical Slackware based 
distribution.  Unlike most of the others it recognises my SB16 ISA 
sound card every time.  My main problem with it (other than 
working out how to install packages - but that is another problem) 
is setting up access to the internet, I add what I think are the 
correct details, it recognises my modem, dials and then after a 
period terminates the connection.  Any ideas of what I should do to 
sort this out?  I suspect you need lots more information if you are 
going to help me out....


Of course I could just go and spend a fair chunk of money (which I 
will do eventually) and get a better computer.  I have installed other 
distributions on higher spec machines with few problems.


-- 
\/ Lyn David Thomas
Web Pages start at:
http://www.cibwr.freeserve.co.uk