On Sun, 21 Nov 2004 12:12:43 -0800 David E. Fox disseminated the following:
> > try plopping a newbie in Debian. Nothing against Debian, I like > > Debian, all 14 discs of Debian, but a newbie is liable to give up and > > never touch Linux again for ten years before he even makes it past the > > base system installation > > Well, sure enough. But that's if you do a real debian based install -- > in many respects an "old fashioned" way to do things, now that there are > a lot of one-disk front ends that are far easier to install (kanotix, > knoppix, mepis, etc). They get you up and running fairly quickly, and > then yuu apt-get everything you can get your hands on :). > > Personally speaking, I might never attempt a "real" debian install, but > I had a rather serious foulup with Mandrake 10.1/cooker a month or so > ago, and I ended up switching to Mepis. In short, I'm very happy with > it. Actually, installing Debian, even as I did it, over the 'Net with boot floppies, is easier in some respects than the same on Mandrake. At least it knows where to look for the packages by itself, right off the bat, unlike Mandrake. *And* it'll run on older hardware. Mandrake simply would not work on the old clunker I wanted to ressurect. Apart from that, it was not much more difficult. The hardware detection is obviously not there in the same way as something like Mandrake, and you have to know how to partition your drive(s), but that's the only difference I could find. Once it's installed, you've got a functional desktop in terms of all the basics, and Synaptic is very close to the Mandrake package manager in MCC, perhaps not as polished. For all the people that dis' Debian, you've got to ask yourself: why is it, then, that distros like Knoppix (and all its variations), Mepis, and Xandros have chosen Debian as their base? If any distro is likely to 'scare' a newbie, I'd wager it's Slackware or Gentoo, certainly not Debian. -- JoeHill / RLU #282046 / www.freeyourmachine.org 16:12:39 up 7:21, 6 users, load average: 0.74, 0.63, 0.48 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++ "Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power" -- Benito Mussolini
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