At 06:49 PM 9/18/02 -0700, james niland wrote: >I find that many of the bigger distros are not that >different really. But if you want a decent small one >ofr newbies which is also easy to setup there are not >so many. I went through half a dozen of them until I >found PEANUT linux. By far the best for it's size (The >small distro is about 220MB iso download) and comes >with kde3,koffice,mmxx,etcetcetc preconfigured. VERY >nice...I was about to give up on Linux until I found >this distro.
I haven't looked at Peanut in a long time, so I won't try to comment on it specifically. I do want to suggest one concern with using distributions other then the top 5 or so: currency of security updates. Any system that is connected to the Internet (even intermittantly, by dialup) needs the apps that connect to the Internet to be updated regularly with security fixes. The big-name distros -- Red Hat, Mandrake, Debian, and a few others -- do this reliably. Others are less diligent. The good immediate test of security currency is whether the distro uses a suffiently recent version of the SSL libraries to plug the MAJOR security hole that has been in the news this week. (It mainly affects apache-ssl, but ssh also uses the SSL libraries.) If not, is it using a sufficiently current version of sshd to plug the hole found in that a couple of months ago? I could go on, but you get the idea; look at any big-5-distro security list to see what the needed updates have been for the last year or so (Debian announces maybe 6 per month, though many affect only small, specialized packages). Then judge your distro of choice by how many of them it has implemented. -- -------------------------------------------"Never tell me the odds!"-------- Ray Olszewski -- Han Solo Palo Alto, California, USA [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-newbie" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.linux-learn.org/faqs
