[CLUE-Tech] distro question

[Michael Riversong]

Had a discussion about distributions yesterday afternoon.  Kind of 
clarified my thinking about this, so it was really neat that the 
question came up at this time.

My situation is that very little time is available to fix broken 
installations.  If it doesn't go right the first time, i pretty much 
have to move on.  I'm running about 30 donated machines of varying 
vintages in 2 classrooms at a small private school.  So a few things 
have become clear:

Slackware won't install if there's any doubt about the integrity of the 
hard drive, which is probably a good thing.  Sometimes it won't install 
on a particular machine, but something else will.  Still haven't gotten 
that one running.

Debian can take way more time than most installations, and i haven't yet 
gotten one to work -- but that's largely been because the machines i 
tried to install it on were flaky and i was desperate at the time.

RH7.3 has worked well on machines about 2 generations back -- 200mHz for 
example.  Elementary students seem to take to it, and also i've gotten a 
lot of useful admin work done with it.

SuSe7.3 has been another champ on those medium vintage machines, and my 
high school students really like the games that come with it.  Audio has 
been great!

Corel will install on machines 3 or 4 generations back, often when 
nothing else will, but it's really not worth it because there's so 
little that comes with it.

Fedora Core has been excellent, and i've started pointing my 
development-oriented students to it.  But some people would legitimately 
object to the fact that it includes way too many packages.  In my 
environment, that's actually a plus.

Xandros does a nice clean hassle-free install and i highly recommend it 
as a business desktop replacement.  Its screen displays are the best of 
all the distros i've tried.

Lycoris has a nice display, but not enough packages to keep the students 
interested.

Finally, every classroom should have a couple of Knoppix disks around.  
They really come in handy for many situations.

On Thursday, June 10, 2004, at 08:59 PM, Nate Duehr wrote:

>
> On Jun 10, 2004, at 8:30 PM, Collins Richey wrote:
>> gnome and kde can be a bitch to install, also, even for gentoo. Since I
>> don't need them on a daily basis, I just wait for the pilgrims to catch
>> the arrow, then install them a few weeks later.
>
> Just playing devil's advocate here... the problem I always had with 
> this approach was I found it took far more time to track the various 
> mailing lists and bugzilla and what-have-you to find out whether or not 
> people got stuck with the arrows than I could afford and still get 
> stuff done.
>
> I'd rather spend the extra time chatting with you guys here in 
> CLUE-Tech!  (GRIN)
>
> But seriously, anyone who knows me knows that one of the phrases I 
> learned from a friend a long time ago is always what I fall back on... 
> Linux is Linux.  There's a lot of debates about distros and what-not, 
> and pretty much it all boils down to -- use whatever you want, they're 
> all Linux.
>
> That is, of course, both the best and the most frustrating thing about 
> Linux -- it's all things to all people because anyone can change it.  
> The hard part is that it's always changing and sometimes hard to keep 
> up with!  Heh.
>
> Adam's problems with mplayer and having to track the progress of the 
> bug for weeks and weeks would drive me batty.  Well more precisely I'd 
> just go watch the silly DVD on the Mac running OS X and be done with 
> it.  (GRIN)  (With a terminal window up ssh'ed into the Linux box 
> working on other more useful "stuff" or answering e-mail or whatever...)
>
> Nate Duehr, nate at natetech.com
>
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