Re: XLEL: Best Dist?

[Nate Reindl <reindlnr@apci.net>]

Quoting Brandon Joseph Adams <bja@illinois.dyndns.org>:

> I saw that slackware and LFS were mentioned and I'm wondering how much

IMHO, Slackware is decent.  LFS is a joke unless you plan to toy around and
learn the meaty innards of Linux.  I don't think it was ever meant to be run as
a production system.  And, even worse, it could take up to a month to get this
box running LFS, just because of how slow it is...

Now, Steve will (most likely) push RedHat until his fingers bleed from typing
too much.  Any newer versions of RedHat probably won't run nicely on this system
without doing some serious tweaking and hacking, so...

Instead, use Debian.  They use older versions of software, sure, but the older
versions they use are stable and help to maintain that wonderful harmony their
distribution has.  If you really must, though, compile the new crap from source
and tweak the defaults.

> experience the person who will be setting it up has. If the person
> dosen't mind a little extra effort in the beginning, FreeBSD
> (www.freebsd.org and you can get ISOs at www.linuxiso.org) is a great
> option for this system. Even the current version 4.7 has great support

Blame me for being liberal, but I actually agree with this to some extent.

> for older hardware and the entire OS can be recompiled for the specific
> hardware right after install with a single command. It has X and via

GENERIC?  No thanks... I roll my own.

> the ports system (probably best on a low end machine so you can get maximum
> performance) you can pick up XFCE 3.x which is a fast, functional GTK+
> based desktop similiar in look to CDE (www.xfce.org). I know FreeBSD

Xfce flat-out rocks, especially when you hack up your own configs and make
everything uniform and neat.  When you do that just right, your users (read:
guinea pigs ;) don't have any confusion about anything and end up asking fewer
questions and creating fewer annoyances.  Of course, there's that thing about
making them switch from Outlook to Mutt, but that'll come with time :)

> isn't exactly linux and we're on a linux list but the userland is _very_
> similiar to the point that probably 80% of the tools are the same
> source.

I'm actually kind of glad someone mentioned one of the bastard BSD systems, even
though I'd advocate NetBSD more openly than FreeBSD since it uses more FSF/GNU
tools by default...

And, yes, the NetBSD developers finally got around to moving the i386 tree over
to XFree 4.2, so stop griping.

-- 
Nate Reindl, silug.org's very own anarchist
"the US isn't a capitalistic country though.. we're a dictatorship. We're
all under control by corporations." -- smj, on capitalism in the US

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