Navigate tohttp://www.elxlinux.com/ for more info.
My initial experience with this distro is positive: 1) Download and burn two cd's worth of day (about 1hr:45mins on cable, 40 minutes to burn on my slow cd-writer. 2) Boot from CD (I have to toggle this setting on my BIOS each time). The CD detects everything necessary (including exact details of my video card and monitor - kudos) and starts X - everything else is eye-candy gui based. 3) Don't choose the default option if you have anything other than Windows to preserve on your harddrive! elx would clear off everything but the windows partitions! 4) I chose the custom option and chose everything except the server category. This amounts to about 2.6G. The partition selection is a bit confusing since they show the hard drives in one pannel and the partitions in another, and you can click on the hard drive choices untill you are blue in the face - only the partitions in the other panel are selectable. Fortunately, the default choice is a reiserfs system. 5) After everything loaded down, and I created a boot floppy, the system booted without a hitch into run level 5. I chose the gnome option first, and I still don't like gnome any better that the last time. 6) dhcp works A-OK, and there's a lot of browsers to choose from, including my favorite, galeon. There were no questions to answer, but elx did the right thing for my tulip card. Galeon segfaulted after the initial wizard series, but it came right back. 7) kde works, too, and kmail, as you can see. The only immediate flaw I see is that the fstab entry for the root file system doesn't have the notail option, which would create a problem for grub. I fixed that in short order. 8) All in all, this looks very much like Mandrake. Elx starts every imaginable daemon, including webmin and portmapper and mysql. I'll have to see how much effort it is to strip it down to a reasonable size. Right now it's a pretty sluggish startup. Should be fairly simple. It's a standard sysvinit type setup with the usual Sxx and Kxx startup and shutdown scripts. It appears to be LSB (or Redhat) compliant - nothing in /opt except wine. It's supposed to be rpm based. 9) My soundcard was detected and works (elx is using alsa). Cups was setup properly, and a quick visit to cups admin setup my printer in short order. Cups is very up to date - first time I've seen a choice for my hp lj1100. It has the right interface for the lpxxx/cups stuff, so the normal lpxx commands work without a hitch. 10) There's a lot of documentation online - I haven't looked at it in depth. 11) This would be a really good distro for a novice - pretty painless to install. If you have a speedier computer, you probably won't notice the lengthy startup as much. 12) Alas, no xfce or sylpheed. I'll give these a try and put up the current kernel and chop away a few of the started daemons. Enjoy, Collins _______________________________________________ Linux-users mailing list Archives, Digests, etc at http://linux.nf/mailman/listinfo/linux-users
