On Saturday 25 August 2007 04:49:27 pm Peter McNabb wrote: First, I think this is a wonderful idea. Unfortunately, I don't know if I'll be able to make it tomorrow, so I'll chime in now.
> While throwing around the idea, we thought of using Fedora, > dansguardian, and tinyproxy. I like the idea of DansGuardian and TinyProxy. I'm not so sure about Fedora. Although I haven't used Fedora, I have used Red Hat and CentOS. I doubt Fedora is any better. In short, it is bloated and complicated. It takes over 1 minute to boot on adequate hardware. Put that on an old machine with a CD you are talking 2-3 minutes to boot if you are lucky. If you have a memory-hungry system (less than 64 MB of RAM) it will take even longer. Ubuntu is not any better. I don't care how l33t you are or how "un"lame you think you are, Ubuntu is still bloated. I tried to install Xubuntu on a 233 Mhz machine with 96 MB of ram and it took 18 hours! It would take 3 minutes to boot and after login to XFCE it was already consuming 32 MB of swap! Anything you did in that machine would cause VM thrashing and was painfully slow. FeatherLinux was a much better leaner system. Even running from the CD anything was easily 3-4 times faster than Xubuntu running from the HD. My point: if you really want this thing to be as universal as possible, you need to start with a very basic distribution. I would recommend Debian to start with. Anything like Fedora or [X,K,]Ubuntu just won't work. Granted, it may get things running up quickly, but you will run into troubles later on. I guess the big question is what are the goals for this project? Is it team unity? Share/gain experience? Do something cool? Do something useful? Do something that's easy to use? Do something that can be used on most old hardware? I would highly recommend this be the first item of business on Tuesday and that it be answered. My guess is that the answer will probably be a list of priorities. Once those priorities are in place, any issue (like distro/filter/proxy/settings/hwardware/etc.) will simply fall into place. Just my $0.000000000000000000002 worth. Footnote: I usually build my systems from source. This makes them very lean and fast. I have created a primitive but functional package manager. It's called SLIM. Although I would highly advise anyone against using it for this project right now, it could be a goal for the future. I have a bootable CD you are welcome to try. It's not very useful, except for system recovery and building another system. Please download it at http://mel.byu.edu/slim-cd-v3a.iso if you are interested. -- Alberto Treviño [EMAIL PROTECTED] Testing Center Brigham Young University -------------------- BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ The opinions expressed in this message are the responsibility of their author. They are not endorsed by BYU, the BYU CS Department or BYU-UUG. ___________________________________________________________________ List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
