Bjorn Nilsen wrote: > May be the list should be cut down to the following as do we really want to > install any thing else for new people to Linux? Debian is my distro of > choice but I would never set it up for a newbie, unless I was prepared to > hand hold them for the next few months.
The big advantages of Debian are that apt-get works so well, and you have a pretty good control of what is installed. > Redhat > Mandrake > Suse > Smoothwall/IPCop I'm somewhat chary of Smoothwall. They are not now offering any support whatsoever for the GPL edition which they see as a taster for buying a commercial version. If somebody were to contact them they will probably either not get any reply at all or else a revolting spew of foul mouthed four letter words. For somebody coming to Linux for the first time the behaviour of the Smoothwall crew would be a big put off. IPCop is an acrimonious fork and by contrast the people there are a delight to work with. The distributions are currently very similar, but diverging rapidly. If it makes any difference the attitude of the Smoothwall people towards the GPL is cavalier to put it kindly. The other type of install I think should be on hand is one of the ones which can be installed on top of Windows, I'm thinking of either Lin4win or Peanut. Unfortunately neither looks particularly attractive visually, and Peanut is really rather too bleeding edge. The reason for suggesting this is that it allows somebody to take the first tentative steps into Linux without altering the partition table. Anybody know of a distribution/brand of this type which they would be happy to have around during the install-fest? >>do you want to really do gentoo if we have limited outside download >>resources? It has to download all the sources then compile them. It >>takes a lot of time (X alone is something like 50-60 MB). There is also >>nothing "automatic" about it, quite tricky, it will take a >>disproportionate amount of the volunteers time to supervise it, and take >>up space another installer could be using. I have the .iso for gentoo-1.2 It contains a prebuilt stage3 install.
