I'm a real newcomer to Linux I know virtually nothing about it. A couple of years ago I went and got a Mandrake distro and tried to load it on my old laptop. I never expected it to be perfect, but there were too many things that went wrong..such as the lcd panel would sometimes flash off and on at some hideous brightness levels. I gave it away after replacing the display panel. This year I went and brought a Redhat 7.2 disk set and tried it on this laptop again..it worked o.k. but I could never get my internal modem going as I always got "incorrect kernel header" from trying to install a precompiled rpm for the correct kernel, and all sorts of other messages if I tried to build my own from source. I surfed the net and found a linux distributer here in N.Z.(Phil Charles) and asked him via email which or who's distribution he recomended in order that i might get this thing up and running on linux, my main criteria was that it have good device support and everything be matching( i.e. kernel headers etc) so that someone with zero real experience might get his pc up and running on linux to begin exploring. He recomended debian, and I bought a set of disks from him. I installed Woody , and used the tar.gz modem source to build a .DEB package and now have this laptop running almost as well as it did with Windows, the only things not functional (as far as I know) are the custom buttons, which I never used anyway. I find linux as confusing as anything, as there seems to be so much choise as to what program you wish to use for agiven job. But it'll come. So as far as I'm concerned Debian is great. I hope it keeps going, I must admit I sometimes find it hard to comprehend how you guys developing it keep on keeping on, I was happy to be able to buy the disks I did as a tiny way of supporting the distro.
A real newbies opinion :-) -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
