Clarence Verge wrote:
>
> Sorry, I'm not cranky. But I have been looking for a
> Linux distri that I could consider trying and so far,
> they are all worse than Windows as far as bloat goes.
Most Linux distros are written to compete with Windows,
so they tend to throw in the "kitchen sink". For a
bloatless Linux, get Slackware 3.x and install just
the important stuff. I recommend these:
----------------------------------------------------
A series: just the required packages, no options
AP series: just groff, man pages
N series: just tcpip, ppp, lynx, pine
----------------------------------------------------
This will give you a pretty powerful CLI Linux in
under 30meg of HDD space.
If you want smaller than this, I've further stripped
down my Slackware to under 8meg of HDD space. It
includes all the necessary binaries/libraries plus
man pages, TCP/IP, dial-up ppp, lynx and pico. The
whole filesystem zips up into a 3meg tarball.
> And not trivial to get running either.
True. The first-time newbie install can be a challenge.
> The friendliest one found so far is Redhat
The easiest to install are Caldera and Corel.
> and although they say a usable system can be a
> 100Mhz '486 with 16Mb ram, they recommend a 133Mhz
> Pentium with 32 Mb ram and 500Mb MINIMUM disk space. :(((
Redhat (and the other "popular" distributions) design
their installation routines to accommodate even the
most brain-dead Windows users. This <of course> means
lots of pretty pictures and a point-and-click interface.
As a result, we end up with a huge, resource-hungry GUI
which bloats the memory and clogs the CPU. Just like
MSwindows.
It is important to remember, however, that this fancy
GUI is totally unnecessary. The fact that Redhat chooses
to use it is a criticism of Redhat, not Linux.
Cheers,
Steven
