At 08:30 AM 2/28/2003 -0500, Frank Roberts wrote: [...]
It is recommended that one acquire the commercial box sets for the commercial distributions or a commercial generated CD set for Debian. For Debian try a company like Cheap Bites.
While I cannot comment on the relative merits of the commercial box sets of Red Hat, Mandrake, and SuSE, I have a lot of experience with Debian installs, and I'm no fan of using its CD sets in normal installation settings (where "normal" merans that a reasonably fast and reliable Internet connection is available). One of Debian's relative strengths among distros is its on-line installer system, which assures that the latest versions of packages in a distro are loaded, not the ones that happened to be included when CheapBytes (not "Cheap Bites") burned its master CDs or DVD.
For Woody (Debian Stable, the one also called Debian 3.0, currently at 3.0r1, December 2002), this mostly means getting the security updates; the price of using a Debian Stable distro is that you do not get frequent updates to packages for non-security reasons.
For Sid (Debian Unstable), package updates are frequent (there are new versions almost every day), and as far as I know, there is no CD option anyway (though I admit I haven't looked for Debian CDs for a long time, I just checked CheapBytes, and they only list 3.0 and the obsolete 2.2/Potato).
After a bit of practice, the "apt" tools used for on-line installs and updates ... at least in my expeirnce ... become fairly easy to use, whereas the "dselect" system used for managing CD files has been overwhelmed by the increase in size of Debian and is very cumbersome to wotk with. This is especially true now that Woody has gotten big enough that it ships on 8 CDs (from CheapBytes, for example) or a DVD (for those of use with DVD drives on our target systems) with CD supplements.
Regarding laptop installs -- I haven't done one in years, but my memory is that they are a nightmare for *any* distro, not just Debian. Laptops give "non-standard component" a whole new meaning. What distro do you *like* for user-level laptop installs (as contrasted to buying a laptop with Linux pre-installed)?
Oh, and one stylistic comment: despite his use of phrasings like "It is/is not recommended", everyone should read Frank's comments as his personal opinions, not a summary of a general consensus. I doubt any general consensus exists on these matters.
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