installfest distros

[Walter Dnes]

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 ?

  I'd say Debian.  For the all machines *INSTALL* Gnome+KDE.  For older
machines *USE* Blackbox for the WM.  There are lots of good Gnome and
KDE *APPLICATIONS* (gimp, AbiWord, Gnumeric, Kmail, etc) but their
*DESKTOP ENVIRONMENTS* are right up there with Windows XP as far as
useless eye-candy and bloat are concerned.  I've found that Blackbox WM
plus Gnome+KDE *APPLICATIONS* work OK on a 400-to-450 mhz machine with
128 megs of RAM.

  Oh, and don't even *THINK* about OpenOffice.  The developers at Sun...
  - obviously think the entire world has machines with at least 512 megs
    of RAM and screaming cpus.
  - has the latest install of Java.  There are quite a lot of menu items
    in OO that simply *WILL NOT WORK* if Java ain't there.

  For additional giggles, it won't build on Gentoo unless you have at
least PAM headers or the full PAM package (although the binary package
appears to install OK).  *WHY*???  BTW, I rip out PAM first thing when
installing Gentoo.  It may be appropriate at an ISP with thousands of
shell accounts, but for a home machine it is a big fat PITA.  It should
be moved out of the main build menu into the optional security area,
where NSA Selinux and other super-duper-secure goodies go.

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes-SLHPyeZ9y/tg9hUCZPvPmw at public.gmane.org>
An infinite number of monkeys pounding away on keyboards will
eventually produce a report showing that Windows is more secure,
and has a lower TCO, than linux.
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