[CS-FSLUG] Cramming and Jamming

[Jerry Van Brimmer]

Quoting Ed Hurst <ehurst at asisaid.com>:

> In many ways, the true test of a Linux distro is whether it will work
> on older hardware.

Aye, and another good test is will it work on newer hardware. As I posted
earlier, I have a SOYO KT880 Dragon2 V2 motherboard. Which is not really new
hardware, about a year and half old I think. Ubuntu 5.10 works fine on it,
Slackware 10.2 works fine on it, but it is a different story with the BSDs. I
recently tried to install FreeBSD 5.4RELEASE, during the initial hardware
detection it simply stopped on a kernel panic. So, I decided to try 
live CDs of
the BSDs to see if any of them would work. FreeSBIE 1.1, no go, same error as
FreeBSD. NetBSD 2.0 Live CD, it would run, but it didn't set up the onboard
nic. I did manage to find an OpenBSD live CD, I don't remember what version it
is, 3.6 I think. It wouldn't run either. So, as far as *newish* hardware goes,
Linux definately has the upper byte.

Ed, have you given Slackware a fair chance? It is built for i486 and up. It
really is a good, stable dist once everything is set up, and left alone. Yes,
it takes some manual tweaking, but you're good at that. It's been so 
long since
I first installed it that I can't remember what the package selection is like,
maybe someone else does. Patrick has developed an almost bulletproof upgrading
system. I think I first installed version 9.0. Since then I have only done
upgrades as each new version came out. Now I'm at 10.2. Never once have I had
an uprade break the system. I just can't say enough about Slackware, I wish
more people would give it at least a fair shake.

> Further, the test is whether it will be useful. My
> old Gateway Solo 2500 is a pretty fair test bed for such things.
> Because it is not my main machine, I can afford to hose the file system
> and replace the installation as needed. It has an i686-266Mhz, 160MB
> RAM, a 4.2GB harddrive, CD-ROM, optical mouse, and Prism chipset
> wireless ethernet card.
>
> As a baseline, I've run RedHat 7.3 on it for quite some time. It runs
> plenty fast, and updates are available through the Fedora Legacy
> Project. The one serious drawback is failure to recognize my wireless
> pcicard without some serious tweaking. However, it is noteworthy KDE
> 3.0 ran quite fast on this setup.
>
> I've also run FreeBSD 4.12, which is almost as quick, and slightly more
> stable. However, it shares RH7's flaws of not supporting too many
> pcicards. Also, getting the most out of FreeBSD requires rebuilding the
> system for optimization. Bumping up to FreeBSD 5.4 slowed things down a
> bit, and rebuild times were more than doubled. Notably, "buildworld"
> takes 13 hours. However, the pcicards are immediately recognized. I
> tried NetBSD's latest, too, but just didn't know enough to configure
> the thing to run too well. I note the boot/install kernel exhibited an
> astounding level of hardware detection, easily rivalling or surpassing
> Knoppix.
>
> So far, every Debian-based system has had trouble displaying properly
> on the LCD screen. Knoppix ran the text on the console one or two lines
> below the bottom of the screen, as did Debian 3.0. Otherwise, they ran
> fairly fast in terms of responsiveness, about equal to FreeBSD 5.4.
> Knoppix 3.4 couldn't ID the wifi card; while 3.6 found it and tried to
> set it up, it failed to make a connection. However, the signal failure
> was Ubuntu 5.10. First, I don't like installers that give me no choice
> in package selection. Second, while it had no trouble identifying and
> setting up my home wireless LAN, it insisted on installing from that
> source, not the disk. Finally, once installed, Ubuntu had a horrifying
> visual lag. The pointer jumped around somewhere near 1/2-sec. behind
> the movements of the mouse. Boot times and screen loading just made it
> unusable. Ubuntu's latest is *fat*. Libranet 2.7 installed and ran
> nice, but couldn't find the wireless. Libranet 2.8.1 simply refused to
> install. I can't identify the error. I had one copy from someone else,
> burned more than one copy carefully, and other disks burned the same
> way on the same hardware worked fine.
>
> The one distro so far to come closest to usefullness was SUSE 9.3.
> Hardware detection was flawless from the start. I was offered the
> chance to bypass the heavy desktops and run Fvwm2 (from which I
> downloaded and installed IceWM). However, it was almost as slow as
> Ubuntu. The difference was at least the display didn't lag. However,
> every action took awhile to churn out results, as there was heavy
> swapping for just about everything.
>
> The biggest disappointment was Vector SOHO. It would have taken the
> entire harddrive just to install, so I bypassed it. Also, CentOS 4,
> while it did install, refused to setup the wifi properly, and appears
> to dislike LCDs. There was no obvious X setup option for the proper
> settings, and I had to adjust the xorg.conf by hand. It ran almost as
> slow as SUSE 9.3. I left out Puppy Linux because it has no build
> packages and uses none of the X drivers, relying entirely on the
> framebuffer. Other lightweight distros had similar drawbacks. (Don't
> even ask, Eduardo.)
>
> As I write this, I'm in the process of installing Kanotix. I'll add a
> sequel to describe that.
>
> --
> Ed Hurst
> -----------
> Plain & Simple Computer Help -- http://ed.asisaid.com/
> Plain Package blog -- http://ed.asisaid.com/blog/
>
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>



-- 
"Praise the Lord, O my soul!" - Psalm 146:1
Jerry Van Brimmer