[SWLUG] Live CDs

[Steve Anderson]

Hi all

Just thought I'd fill you in on recent developments in my world - you 
can ignore if you like =)

Mandrake 10 died on me last week. It never worked quite as it should - 
Samba was the main problem. Everything said it should work, and it never 
did. I also had issues with the Control Center thing and thought the 
firewall was way too simplistic. Anyway, Nautilus/GNOME packed up on 
Friday, and startx failed as well, so I decided to reboot... and it 
never came back up. It decided that eth0 had disappeared - first problem 
- and when getting to start SMB it hung. It seemed I had a reason to 
dump Mandrake and go back to Debian - but first to recover the data I 
wanted to keep. Time to crack open the Live CDs scattered around the house.

I tried Knoppix first, which was fine - but KDE. I hate KDE. Never liked 
it. And not sure what I'm doing with it when I get forced to use it. 
LinNeighbourhood refused to play ball with my network, not sure why, and 
connecting to another machine over FTP with Konquerer was okay but it 
seemed to only take a single file at a time.

Damn Small Linux - damned confusing experience. I've been spoilt by GUI 
apps that require the horsepower of a Pentium 166MMX to run it seems.

Morphix - probably would've been fine if the Linux Format coverdisc 
wasn't the Games pack, and if it had been a little more recent. Didn't 
feel comfortable with whatever the super-light WM was, couldn't figure 
out where I'd be able to squirt my files over without a tonne of shell 
scripts. Gave up.

Mandrake Move - Mandrake broke "teh megahurtz!!!1!1? lol" so I gave a 
wide berth, especially when it refused to mount my hard drive.

Gnoppix - essentially a GNOME Knoppix. It's fantastic! The latest beta 
version has GNOME 2.8 and Kernel 2.6.7 and a fair range of packages - 
some stuff's not working quite right yet but it's very actively updated. 
But, my main reason for trying it was the GNOMEness. My Mandrake box has 
been stuck on GNOME 2.4 for some time (another one of the issues I've 
found with it - a peculiar dependency hell) so I wasn't aware of how 
good 2.6 or 2.8 had become. Connecting to other machines was a breeze 
within Nautilus, as was mounting the hard drive. Recovered EVERYTHING 
without any problem, and happily played Frozen Bubble whilst things were 
progressing.

So, to conclude. Give Gnoppix a try, it's great.

Steve