I'll get a look at Mepis & Morphix when I can. There's always a new Knoppix out too!
Chris Day wrote:
True - but it irks me when all the so called 'latest' versions vary so widely with their hardware detection. Ubuntu failed on my fairly new system but was OK on an older Geode based SBC. From all the distro's Ive tried installing over the past 2~3 years, I'd rank Knoppix as having pretty good hardware detection and MDK as being the dest for sorting out partition problems..
MDK can be good with hardware too, and I agree as to your evaluation criteria that makes Knoppix so very good. I devised a short checklist of points to test all distro's against, for newbie useability:
1. hardware detection & setup 2. modem driver setup ease 3. package selection & updates 4. something else I can't recall just now..
#2 is the biggest problem, after which #3 lets you beat the Winworld re security with varied simpicity (eg do Fedora & up2date work?).
Of course none of this happens without effective #1.
Install was quite easy (for a Linux distro) - insert CD, reboot, wait for desktop to appear then press CTRL + ALT + F1 - type knx2hd and press enter. Install script starts up - menu driven - select your options and go. I can't recall all the options or exact steps I took - it was intuitive and I managed to fumble my way through it OK - would think someone with a base knowledge of Windows would be OK. Apart from the initial knx2hd bit, everything was menu driven - no stupid console mount stuff. Once install finished, I typed reboot - all services shut down, CD ejected and system rebooted when I pressed a key as asked. Upon reboot, Lilo asked which OS (install had found the windoze partitions) - selected Linux and within a short time kdm appeared. Logged on under the user name and password I had entered in the install setup procedure and was presented with the KDE desktop setup - set regional setting, turned sound effects on and wamo Linux was up and running.
Good to hear that's been well sorted since I last tried c2 years ago.
Another thing surprised me - its a debian system so I updated the sources list to jetstream games, did an update then upgrade and was really surprised to see I needed to pull down a handful of new packages. But a word of warning for those doing this - 'frozen-bubble-data' package has something wrong with its install script and will break things if you try to uninstall it. To fix it took a few hours of figuring where all of it was, deleting it then manually updating files - a real pain. But all's OK now and you'll probably only have this problem if your like me and want to strip out all games, locales and other stuff to get a small install - without doing this your looking at about a 1.8 gigs HD install.
1.5 for Ubuntu, no extras. I have stuck with the official downloads via Synaptic, & struck no problems.
Cheers, Rik
