> my favorite is Corel's package, which is based on Debian - actually, I
> sprung for the retail pack of Corel Office 2000 for Linux, which includes
> a Debian distro, and was extremely well impressed. It might not sit as
> well with the hard-core geeks who prefer religious wars over emacs vs vi
Oh no, Corel includes both Emacs and vi. :-)
When I first saw Corel's GNU/Linux distribution I was floored -- very,
very nice. Since then, however, I've cooled a bit towards it. I think
Corel has the right idea and a huge target market, but a bit of a sloppy
implementation.
For example, when installing it on a system with a PS/2 mouse port but
using a serial mouse, Corel just assumed I was using a PS/2 mouse. It was
no problem for me to jump to a tty and edit /etc/X11/XF86Config to correct
the problem, but were clueless newbies supposed to do that? I would've
preferred an idiot check list of hardware to confirm during the install.
I never did figure out how to add my non-autodetected Ethernet card into
Corel "properly" (not that I tried awfully hard). If I added the driver
into /etc/modules like one would do in a normal GNU/Linux system, Corel
recreates that file dynamically at boot time, thus blowing away my changes
(erasing a human-created config file without prompting is a Debian cardinal
sin!). I finally wound up adding a special init script to config the card,
but of course even though the NIC worked Corel's slick GUI admin tool didn't
realize the card was there and wouldn't let me configure the networking with
the GUI.
While Corel is based on Debian but the similarity ends there. One major
knock is that Corel invented their own package naming/numbering scheme so
you can't easily take advantage of Debian's huge pool of packages (at least
not without some conflicts).
> Ask me in a month or so, I may be giving the presentation comparing
> distros at the SHARE conference in July so I'll be researching this a lot
> if that pans out.
One distribution I'd suggest checking out is Storm Linux
<http://www.stormlinux.com>. It's also Debian-based, but IMHO, it's done
"right."
Storm has a slick, mindlessly simple text-or-GUI install routine
(comparable to Red Hat 6.2's), is very polished, and -- best of all -- it'll
seamlessly allow you to take advantage of Debian's ~5000 software packages
or to totally convert the software over to a "real" Debian system.
--
. | Windows: buggy, bloated, slow, multiple reboots
Randy |
([EMAIL PROTECTED]) | You can't live with Windows, but you CAN live
http://www.golgotha.net | without it! http://www.golgotha.net/why-linux/
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