Pelon wrote:
> You are correct, of course. But most
> professionals and many domestic penguins have
> lots of old hardware sitting around gathering
> dust. One of the beauties of linux' versatility
> is the chance to resurrect some of those old
> geezers. I may run a full install on my main
> machine, but there are two 486's and a P75 that I
> would like to make useful (the hard drives are
> so small I embarrassed to reveal their sizes).
> Mailserver / Internet machine / Backup etc.
Why not to use other distro for these machines? Slackware or similar. I
used 386 machines for small highly automatized servers (fax server, mail
server for example) And they did their job quite well. I think that
pushing Mandrake into universality could be a serious mistake. That is
what M$ tried to do. What came out of this is pretty visible. Well the
list is long so I would prefer to discuss it in other place.
Mandrake is a distro for the average user. As far as I can understand
that is the mission Mandrakers set (I don't work for them btw). I think
this is a pretty good goal. In general, the distro fits this mission.
And a mission means some objective to reach. This naturally mean that
there are some things that will be prior and other secondary. Others
should be drop out at all. I believe that some specializations, like
making small servers, are out of the scope of what Mandrake should be.
This requires a high level of checkups of very specific details. Every
server package should be strictly checked and tested. Besides one should
concentrate on a more "console/demon" world rather than a GUI one.
Mandrakers are great people but they also have limits on what they can
do. They are already doing a great: making a Linux for users. Asking
them for "doing everything" may kill the little star pinguin. Don't you
think?
Ektanoor
