Logan wrote:
> On Thu, 2003-01-09 at 10:18, bpreece1@tampabay.rr.com wrote:
>
>>Right now another great Dedbian based Distro is Xandros.
>>
>
> Egads! What the devil is so difficult about installing Debian?!?!
> With the exception of my European boxen, which run SuSE at their behest,
> all of my American boxen run Debian.
> Xandros sounds cool if you run M$ regalia, but I haven't used
> anything M$ since DOS 5.0 when I switched from a Commodore 64 to a shiny
> new IBM i386 20MHz and DOS 5.0 and it complained (in 1991, with a
> staggering 4MB of RAM and 20MB HHD) of an "out of memory error" running
> SimCity, which worked perfectly on my C64 (with a mighty 64k,) but would
> not on my IBM and thus, I had to learn about DOS HIMEM nonsense. I dilly
> dallied with other operating systems for sometime and was ready to
> install Minix on my 386, at a vilely higher price than Windoze is now,
> when in 1994 I discovered Linux. Compared to the early versions of
> Linux, using a RAM disk 5 1/4 floppy, a boot disk 5 1/4 floppy and 50
> minute to over an hour kernel compile times to make my drivers, Debian
> is an utter blessing. Its stability is non-parallel. In my opinion, if
> you want to use Linux and just Linux, Debian is the way to go and there
> is nothing difficult about the commands, "apt-get update," and "apt-get
> -u upgrade."
> Anyway, all of the users in the orthodontic offices (over 100)
> across the US and Europe which have my Linux servers, along with a
> multitude of dumb terminals, to include Loma Linda University of
> California, have commented they enjoy the ability to log in at any
> terminal and have the same desktop, no matter where they log in. They
> also enjoy system maintenance from afar with SSH, which is much cheaper
> than having a technician come to their office.
> Debian is easy to install. If you have installed something like Red
> Hat, SuSE or Mandrake or any other automagically installed distro, run
> the command "lsmod" as root, write down the list of modules produced and
> you can install Debian just the same, with less money out of your
> pocket. Then possibly make a small donation to the Free Software
> Foundation with the money you would have spent buying a distro.
> My God! Was that a rant? Forgive me. I did not mean to sound
> like Dennis Miller, especially since my rant was no where near as
> humorous and lacking similes... But in his words:
> This is just my opinion and I could be wrong...
>
> The Logan
>
I agree with you as far as desktop pc's go. Debian is a pain to setup on
some laptops though. Although Woody seemed easier (to me anyway) to
install on the laptop than the earlier releases were. Knoppix was the
first Debian based distro that I have seen that would actually install
and configure my laptop's hardware correctly.
But my first distro was Slackware 2, purchased when it first was
released. A real whopper of a release too. :) 275 MB of disk space to
install everything, X and games included. All that from 100 floppies.
Have you ever copied to 100 diskettes from a 2x cdrom on a 386? I know
the meaning of eternity after that. Couldn't install it from the cdrom
because the drive was new and not supported at that time. The entire pc
was new and mostly unsupported hardware. That experience made adjusting
to Debian a lot easier for me than it seems to be for others that have
only tried RH or Mandrake before. Administration tools applet? Hardware
detection? No such thing then. You had better know your command line
tools by heart. And it seemed like everything you did in Slack back then
meant recompiling the kernel. You want sound? Recompile the kernel. You
upgraded your sound card? Recompile the kernel. You want LILO on the
mbr? Never did get that one to work right. I think that installing LILO
and adding users were the only things that didn't require a kernel
compile on that version. :)
Jeff
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