On Thu, 14 Jul 2005 20:28, Nick Rout wrote: > maybe so, but how does this relate to rpm?
Most Corporate distros use it. Most Community ones don't. Anyway what the fellow needs is information about which is the best distro to install, given that he is a seasoned Win victim. My opinion is still that he'd be best off using Debian or [K]Ubuntu, or Mepis, or SuSe. At some point in the future he might like to experiment with a source distribution such as Gentoo or Sourcerer. http://www.gentoo.org/ http://sorcerer.wox.org/ As Steve says it's important to remember that it's the source that counts. He also asked about hardware. I maintain that most mainstream winmodems are now supported reasonably well, to wit:- The hcf and hsf series chipsets from Conexant. http://www.linuxant.com/ While the precompiled and ready to go drivers cost $US14.95, if you have the time and experience, you can download the sources and build them yourself for free. RMS won the argument about the applicability of the GPL. The SmartLink modem driver works well. http://www.smlink.com/objects/slmodem-2.9.10.tar.gz It needs this patche to build properly for 2.6 kernels. http://www.ok--computer.com/linux/asus/slmodem-2.9.10-abby.diff From personal experience, I can vouch for both of the above working properly. Lucent Apollo (ISA) and Mars (PCI) chipsets http://ltmodem.heby.de/ To partake of the black magic and voodoo for the others see:- http://www.linmodems.org/ Printer. Hewlett-Packard support some of their products extremely well. Take care to check before you purchase. Canon, while making superior products, don't support Linux at all. Some talented hackers have back-engineered the protocols and created drivers, but there is nothing official afaik. Brother seem to be doing quite a reasonable job of offering binary packages for some of their printers and scanners. The main thing to watch out for is that the SATA drives are not yet universally supported under Linux. For more "What's wrong with Linux" argument see:- http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/008499.html -- CS
