[Techtalk] Question on distro....

[hobbit at aloss.ukuu.org.uk]

On Tue, Feb 26, 2002 at 12:55:18AM -0500 or thereabouts, Terri Oda wrote:
> 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 

One other desktop environment worth looking at if KDE and Gnome are
sluggish is XFce. It uses the gtk+ libraries, but it doesn't pull in
all the Gnome libraries as well. (Gnome uses gtk and then lots of 
its own libraries too.) XFce is much lighter as a result. If you are 
used to the appearance of CDE, you will probably recognise it. (I don't 
think it looks  that similar myself, but lots of people do, and it's a 
long time since I saw CDE.) I know that it was packaged on the extra
CD on the European version of RH 7.2, I am confident that both Mandrake
and Debian (woody, at least; dunno about potato) will have packages of it. 

	http://www.xfce.org 

> 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. :)

In fairness, I have had apps in Gnome cause X crashes and hangs.
 
> 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.

When I got a second very very tiny computer, I put Debian on it. 
Via floppies. And got a ppp link working to another computer which
had the CDs on it. Painful. I was trying to keep it all down, but
it was still painful. The next time, I again had a computer with 
32Mb of RAM (which I don't think is enough for RH's current installer) 
but a much better connection and lots of disk space, I used Debian,
did a minimal install, and then apt-got anything I missed. That
went very smoothly. I had a specific problem to do with X and my
funky Cyrix MediaGX (supported in some of X3 but not at the time in
X4) but this was something I was half-expecting. The general 
"start small, add as you need" theory was sound :)

> 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 

I'll second that. However, I had heard so much about Debian's installer
that I was prepared for it. And I took the time to read the (excellent)
docs on the install and to read the dselect tutorial. And when I got 
tired, I simply left it sitting at a prompt and came back the next
day, fresh and ready to go. It was much less of a problem than the 
horror stories had made out, because I somehow didn't get into the 
dselect tangle that seems to catch most people.

Another caveat about Debian installs: don't leave it to install over
a metered pay-per-minute network connection overnight and come back 
the next morning expecting to see it done. As each package arrives, 
you are asked to configure it (it has helpful suggestions on defaults). 
A friend said his brother got to this stage, went to bed, and found it 
sitting there, with the modem still on, the next morning, waiting for 
his choices for one of the very first packages. We don't generally have 
flat rate connections here, and this made a big dent in the phone bill. 

Ugh. I hope this wasn't too long.

Telsa