[CS-FSLUG] Why?

[N.Thompson]

Clawman wrote:

> Well sir,
>
>> I can't find a distribution I want to stick with its been like that 
>> since I stopped using Mandrake 9.1, I 've found some that worked but 
>> none that worked well and rather then complain I want to know why 
>> everyone in the list thinks some of the distributions they've tried 
>> were good or bad and what they think of my observations on the 
>> distributions I've tried.
>>
>> Fedora was a step up from Debian, it was more polished but I didn't 
>> like how Red Hat had removed packages from KDE itself and tried to 
>> fill the void with Gnome applications, also package management was no 
>> less clumsy then with Debian and software was difficult for me to 
>> find because there was no way for me to find out what I even wanted 
>> nevermind where to find it. 
>
>
> Here is where I chime in (and how little that is these days).  I am 
> partial to Peanut Linux + Enlightenment for super small distro's.  
> Under 400 megs gives you a super-duper fast distro with a great window 
> manager (Enlightenment) that will run well even on old p200 machines.  
> Plus, the Peanut Linux site has the most updated packages already 
> configured and ready to go.
>

Peanut looks interesting but I found by looking at their site that they 
do not have KDE installed by default, I could do that by hand but I 
imagine it would be a lot of work. I'm going to try for something that 
already has KDE first though.

> For a fast, full distribution designed for 500 - 1Ghz machines, I 
> prefer Cobind.  It still uses a modified 2.4.26 kernel (0.3 will 
> feature the 2.6 kernel), but it has all the features of Fedora Core 1 
> (including graphical install) but without the bulk of Gnome and KDE 
> and the libraries they carry as baggage.  A full install is under 800 
> megs and runs quiet zippy (it is seriously fast).  It can be updated 
> using FC1 or FC2 repositories, which means that you have access to 
> Xine, W32Codecs, Audacity, all the gnome and system-config tools and 
> more through their Yum GUI or through apt/synaptic.  With the addition 
> of the 2.6 kernel, Cobind was so fast on my wife's 1.72 Ghz Athlon 
> that it even left WinXP in the dust (and that is alot to expect from a 
> Fedora based distro).
>

Cobind does look interesting but the KDE shortage once again makes me 
unsure about trying it, I think I did once but I can't remember why I 
didn't stick with it.

> For machines over 1 Ghz a dilemma exists.  I guess it depends on the 
> need. For someone who knows Linux and wants to install all the latest 
> software, I'd recommend Fedora 2.  I keep a collection of at-testing, 
> at-bleeding and development repositories in my sources.list for 
> getting the latest of anything.  Their version of Open Office is 
> themed and generally really cool to use.
> For a noobie ... I'd recommend Suse or Mandrake.  Both support most 
> hardware and have good repositories.  Neither has the mass of software 
> on tap like Fedora, but Fedora requires a little more know-how to 
> operate.  With either of these you can go hardcore linux if you want, 
> but you don't have to.  Their system configuration utilities are 
> perfect for noobs as well as their updating techniques.
> Well, from my experience, that's what I would recommend (for what it's 
> worth).
>

I've been trying to download fedora core since last night, now I've 
given up on the traditional method and I'm just fetching it from a 
torrent file. I haven't given FC2 a fair chance yet and their changelog 
shows that they have included K3b in this release. I won't be able to 
use it though until I get more CD's.

> By the way, I have decided to start the Claw project again 
> (http://groundhog.zevallos.com).  I saw the good work Nathan was doing 
> and, along with some people in Italy running Gentoo nagging me to 
> continue, I decided to continue the project.  I totally rewrite the 
> code from scratch, adding features, gtk2 themes and optimizing it to 
> death. And hey, it works in Enlightenment since it has no Gnome or KDE 
> dependencies.  Any ways, keep it up Nathan, you are doing a great job 
> programming and inspiring others to do the same!
>

Its always nice and encouraging to know that there are other developers 
in the CS-FSLUG list :-) .

>
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