[Techtalk] Question on distro....

[Raven, corporate courtesan]

Heya --

	I, too, meant to answer the question on newchix if nobody else
did, and spaced it.  Oops.

Quoth Caitlyn Martin (Mon, Feb 25, 2002 at 05:46:15PM -0500):
> > This box is a P120, 1.2gig HD, 32meg RAM, so size matters somewhat.
> > Smallest major to put on it that I've found is actually FreeBSD, but
> > I'm suspecting that for coursework I'll make myself fewer headaches if
> > I stay with linux.
> 
> Since you don't want Red Hat 7.2 (on my old Libretto 50CT and working
> fine), I'd agree with the recommendation for Slackware.  It's not
> terribly user friendly, though, but is way configurable and easy to keep
> small.  I think you could easily get a minimal SuSe install into that
> system and that would be a bit more user friendly.  

	Slack or Debian should work -- but if you go for a minimal
install on Debian, you'll want to add packages.  The minimal install is
*really* minimal, and doesn't include many of the common (and small)
tools Linux-folk are used to using.  (less, for example, was absent the
last time I did a minimum Debian build.)

	SuSe -- if you want XWindows on there, you're probably going to
have to pick out your packages manually as well.  I did a SuSe install a
month or so ago (my first) and was surprised to see that several of my
normal tools (useradd and adduser, for example) weren't there -- it
appears that you have to do things like that through yast2.  (Of course,
catting a line to /etc/password and /etc/shadow also works, if you
really need to add a user on a minimal system.)  A slightly less
bare-bones install made me much happier.  The installer will tell you
how much space you need for the various builds, too.  We were able to
get a system with XWindows, KDE, and a good set of Perl and C
development tools on there in about 1.2 gigs.  So if you don't need the
dev tools or are willing to not use KDE, you should be fine.  

> haven't played with the latest SuSe, but if it lets you go without Gnome
> or KDE and use a lightweight WM from the start (i.e.: IceWM, XFCE,
> AfterStep, etc...) it would be a really good choice.

	IIRC, it gives you the option of several to start off with --
WindowMaker, KDE, and fvwm are the ones I recall, but you can certainly
pick your own when you do the package selection.

Cheers,
Raven
 
"If I'm going to try Emacs, you have to try the drill."
  -- Ben, on experimentation