Nancy Merckle [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] suggested: [....] > I'm sure that FC5 will come with the latest version of OOo, > and will be as > easy to maintain/upgrade. That said, a live-cd version of > Linux will give > you a feel for the system and it is very handy to have. I > recently hosed > my /home directory, and used Knoppix to fix things so that I > could get > things back up and running. Knoppix is the KDE version with > Gnoppix the > Gnome version.
Gosh, can I plump for SuSE? But seriously, the advantages of a LiveCD Linux version have been highlighted, but if you have a spare hard disk (or large partition), you really lose nothing (except a bit of time) by installing a full distribution. What you gain is what people want when they go for a major Linux distribution.... STUFF! There's a limit to what you can cram into 640MB of CD, so the Knoppix people (and others doing liveCD distros) need to be very selective. When you install Fedora or SuSE from multiple CDs -- or more conveniently, from a dual-layer DVD -- you get a ton of applications of all types; gigabytes. Moreover, all of those applications have been tested and integrated by the distributors of that Linux flavor. So if your hard disk is big enough, you can select _all_ the packages, and they'll all be installed without conflicts, and often with pre-config settings to make them work smoothly on that distribution. For example, GNOME and KDE have been the two most popular integrated desktop environments for several years, and you can get them direct from their respective projects. However, RedHat always went to a lot of extra trouble to fancy up the GNOME that they delivered. SuSE always went to a lot of extra trouble to fancy up the KDE that they delivered. If you installed SuSE and elected to have GNOME installed from the CD, it was only minimally tweaked from the version that you could get by going down the street to the GNOME web site, because SuSE was not as fanatical about GNOME as they were about KDE. A few components were optimized for use with the rest of the SuSE stuff, but SuSE usually didn't go to any real trouble with fancy themes and co-ordination of GNOME. But if you chose their KDE as your desktop, it was noticeably prettied-up from the generic KDE-project version of KDE, with a large amount of effort poured into making it look really nice and work very smoothly with both KDE and non-KDE apps that you'd find on the SuSE distro. Same idea in reverse if you were using RedHat. They provided KDE, but they really dressed up GNOME and put a cherry on top. Now, of course, SuSE is owned by Novell, which also bought a couple of famously GNOME-ish companies, so SuSE will definitely be getting very snazzy GNOME flavors in future releases. We KDE appreciators can only hope that they'll continue to put similar effort into KDE. :-) Anyway, there's a point to this ramble. As an OOo user who (presumably) has been using it in Windows and is just now looking at Linux, you are interested primarily in the GUI desktop experience of Linux, and only secondarily in the other aspects. So things like desktop integration are important. You'll tend to get less of everything with a one-CD solution. If you really want the full flavor, then get hold of a SuSE or Fedora (or other big distro) DVD and stuff it in there. Just the fact that you can open the "SuSE" menu (roughly equivalent to the Windows START menu) and find well over a thousand applications, all nicely organized and all nicely integrated, is an impressive aspect that doesn't quite come through when you run Knoppix from a CD. You also don't learn how effortlessly the SuSE or Fedora (or other distro) installer can configure all your hardware, set up your partitioning, and seamlessly handle the dual-boot (or triple boot or whatever) with your existing Windows... something that Windows itself cannot do, and that Knoppix doesn't need to do (since Knoppix goes away when you don't boot from the CD). Just a little more factoid-like-substance to consider. Cheers, Kevin (who nevertheless likes Knoppix but uses SuSE at home and RH at work when he's not compelled to use Windows) The information contained in this electronic mail transmission may be privileged and confidential, and therefore, protected from disclosure. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately by replying to this message and deleting it from your computer without copying or disclosing it. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
