On Sun, 21 Nov 2004 15:02:28 -0500, Cris Thomas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I've been experimenting with different PPC compatible Linuxes (Linuxi?). > I'm not a complete newbie but I'm not an expert either. I could not get > Mandrake installed, I was succesful with Gentoo but what a pain, YDL 4.0 > only came out today but beta testers haven't seemed to happy. Debian > installed fairly easy, still have some minor issues with Gnome and X though. > By comparison Ubuntu was a breeze. Insert CD and done. Pretty simple. > > I am slightly concerned that Ubuntu is too easy and may lack the > capabilities for what I want to do, which I admit probably isn't all that > complicated. Its newness also has me a little worried.
Ubuntu is a so-called "child" distribution of Debian (the release is based on a Debian snapshot), with some narrowing of options and other refinements to make it easy to install. Their default set of packages have been chosen to appeal to lots of users -- it sounds like it worked for you! > Debian on the other hand may be more complicated than I want. I wasn't [too] > encouraged when X took serious tweaking to get it to boot up. The main advantage for going "straight" Debian is when you need something that's not supported by the Ubuntu distro, and/or you are running a platform not supported by it. Ubuntu is limited to i386, "new-world" PPC and AMD64, whereas it seems like there's a Debian for just about everything. I, too, have had trouble installing most distros on my "oldworld" Macs and outdated Pentium boxes, but so far I have been more success with Debian than anything else. Ubuntu was a real breeze to install on my Mother-In-Law's Pentium PC, and I have felt pretty comfortable setting it up for her for email and occasional word processing. So I have become pretty fond of Ubuntu on those systems it installs easily on. But when you get "under the hood" it's a Debian system so anything you learn there transfers just fine. The only thing that you mentioned that would give me pause is WebDAV -- if you just want to connect to a WebDAV server as a client that's one thing. But it's a bit complicated to set up on a server. I think that would be exactly the same whether you went with Ubuntu or Debian or Gentoo or whatever.
