installfest distros

[Allen Taylor]

On Sun, May 08, 2005 at 01:34:03PM -0400, David J Patrick wrote:
> Presuming that those bringing their box to an installfest are less
> experienced (else, why don't they just do it themselves ?) What distros
> should we be considering ? If follow-up support is part of the picture,
> should there even be an option ?
> 
> ubuntu
>  . . . 
>
> mepis (personally never tried it, but comes highly recommended)
>  . . .
> 
> DamnSmallLinux (for hardware underachievers)
>  . . . 
> 
> others ?

Hmm - I notice a slight Debian bias in the above.  :-)

Pro: An all Debian derived installfest will make support options
simpler for those helping out.
Con: Someone like me, who has never used Debian outside of booting
Knoppix (and it's relatives) from CDROM, will be a little handicapped in
some aspects of the install (although I suspect that most questions /
challenges will be fairly generic).

So, at the risk of starting a distro war (skirmish ?), might I humbly
suggest Slackware as an alternate distro. My thoughts here (besides the
fact that there are five machines around my desk running Slackware 9.? 
thru 10.1) is that there may be some in attendance that are fairly
adept at these computer things, want to learn about this Line-Ux they've
been hearing about, and would like a more "hands on/learning" oriented
distribution.

I recognize that we don't want every machine to have a different distro
(do we?) but a couple of different mainstream categories should be
manageable.

Just a thought?

Allen

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