> -----Original Message----- > From: Cade Cairns [mailto:cairnsc@;carbon.net] > Sent: Thursday, October 31, 2002 11:45 AM > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: RE: (clug-talk) <rant> > > > What kind of software did you install? Did you include X or configuration > tools? What sort of network apps? One of the many things that I prefer > about Debian is that it has a very minimalistic installation (arguably, > the others can too) and the software is very stable. > I did a "minimal" Mandrake install (on the install stage where you pick which "package groups" you want to install (KDE, GNOME, all that), I unchecked everything. No X, nothing fancy). Then I went to the individual package selection and picked a few things like SSH and, in this case, bridge-utils, though like I said, haven't got that one running yet. The install ended up being about 250 meg, I think. That was minimal enough for me. Left plenty of room on the 2 GB hard drive for logs and other stuff. My only beef with a non-X install of Mandrake is as far as I know all their drak tools are X-only. That's why I wanted to believe in SuSE, because YaST has an ncurses version. But that's just laziness - I can edit config files by hand, I'm capable that way. As for stability, Mandrake 9.0 is the most stable .0 release of any distro I've ever run. I was impressed.
> It just often seems to me that the other distributions include a lot of > crap that you really don't need, which eventually leads to system clutter > and security vulnerabilities that shouldn't have existed in the first > place. > Agreed. That's why I went with the minimal Mandrake install, since it only has a 2 GB drive. On my main desktop I think I filled 2 GB with a regular install of X, KDE, GNOME, and all the goodies, but I have an 80 GB drive there, so I care not. :-) Ian
