[Techtalk] Question on distro....

[Terri Oda]

At 03:55 PM 25/02/02 -0600, Ms. Piglet wrote:
>I'm *thinking* that where I want to go is Debian potato, but I wanted to ask
>and see if I'm missing something.  When I was working, my main desktop was
>running Corel which is Debian anyhow, so I guess I'm biased that direction
>already....

Debian should be just fine.  I run it on my machine with much higher stats 
but a similarly-sized hard drive partition and I haven't had space 
issues.  I have to agree that KDE and Gnome may be bad news with your 
processor -- I know the P166 a friend has set up is dreadful with either 
window manager.  I'm a big fan of AfterStep myself, but that's largely 
because I had major problems with KDE (not speed so much as locking up the 
entire laptop to the point where I had to pull the battery and the plug to 
shut it off so I could restart... I was *not* impressed, since I've never 
even seen windows do that!) and decided to revert to what I used to use 
back when 486's were only slightly obsolete. :)

I second Raven in saying that the debian minimal install is *very* 
minimal.  The one that got me is that man isn't installed.  All the pages 
are there, and I could gzip and cat 'em to my heart's content, but no man 
binary!  Very odd and rather silly, in my opinion.

And if you haven't seen the Debian install, let me warn you, it was like 
stepping back in time for me -- much more primitive than Redhat's, 
anyhow.  Still, as long as you've got all the info for your machine it 
shouldn't be a problem.  And, in fact, perhaps your machine is old enough 
that some of the auto-detection will actually work.  (My machine, 2.5 years 
old now, is completely auto-detected by RH and barely recognized by my 
recent debian install.)  Of course, just like the old days, it's possible 
to get everything working, just make sure you know about all the hardware 
in your machine before you start or you'll be doing a lot of searching as 
you go.

  Terri