[TAG] which distribution?

[Richard Bray]

On Tue March 09 2004 05:49, Thomas Adam wrote:
>  --- Alan Pope <alan at popey.com> wrote:
>
> What you'll find is that they're all more-or-less the same (discount
> slackware, that is more BSD-ish in operation) both with their disk layout
> (yay for LSB) and with the programs that they offer. For instance,
> Mandrake/Fedora (the successor to RH) use their empahsis towards the GUI,
> and hence offer lots of packages and setups to that goal. SuSE do this to
> an extent as well.

I disagree. The one feature that differentiates the distros for the new user 
is the control panel like programs to setup the machine. I haven't seen 
SUSE's most recent version but I hear they finally surpassed Mandrake in ease 
of configuration post install. 

All the distros seem to be easy to install now. Debian included, if you use 
something like KNOPPIX to install. It's configuring printers, mice, 
firewalls, and other system services after the install where most distros 
fail. Red Hat is probably the worst. If they offer a control panel, it's 
horribly handicapped. The firewall config is the best example.

> If you want to give things a try, I suggest you download and create for
> yourself a Knoppix CD (http://www.knoppix.com), which is handy both as a
> live CD as to what you *can* do with your computer, but also as a backup
> CD for when things go, errm, wrong.
>
I agree about KNOPPIX. Everyone should have that laying around even if they do 
not want to run linux. The Windows administrators at my company use it to 
rescue dead Windows boxes now. They can boot KNOPPIX and copy the important 
files off the machine onto a backup server before re-installing Windows to 
repair it. :) 

Someday they will get smart and just put it on the hard drive in stead.

-- 
Richard A. Bray
linux at brayra.com
http://brayra.com