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Re: [LUG] RE: Which Distibution?



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Solfius wrote:
|
| Mandrake seems the best as far as recomendations go, I've read a lot of
| good stuff about it, and it seems that there won't be any hardware
| problems. Only problem is getting hold of a copy of it, I know Mark
| offered some help with that, so that's a possible route.

Hardware support for Linux is primarily in the kernel, or the XFree86
suite - so if it runs on one version it is pretty likely to work with
any other similar distro assuming the kernel version is the same or later.

There are one or two exceptions where proprietary drivers are shipped in
some installers and the like.

But your hardware sounds fairly vanilla, usually the big problem is new
or wayout graphics cards, or just new hardware where the vendor isn't
Linux friendly as it takes time for free software to get written and
longer if people have to reverse engineer hardware because the vendor is
~ difficult.

| Debian was also mentioned (knoppix is based on it) so maybe that could
| be a possibility similar to knoppix but with more support? I don't know
| quite how similar those two are.

Knoppix is a bootable CD which recognises the hardware as it boot, and
runs applications from the CD. As such it is basically a version of
Debian hacked around to do slightly better hardware detection.

Debian is maintained largely as a volunteer effort, there is no attempt
to make a commercial distribution. Indeed CDs distro's are somewhat
discouraged as they tend to date too quickly (don't we know that with
the LUG where we can't give Linux CDs away fast enough).

However in my experience Debian stable is the most reliable, and least
buggy general purpose operating system I've ever used, and I've used a LOT.

Debian is probably harder to get installed than Mandrake, but it is dead
easy to install application software once it is properly installed and
configured.

| SuSE sounds well supported, maybe popular too, and it's cheap for a
| boxed set to, or atleast by my reckoning, £20 on amazon.co.uk.

You are more than welcome to the DCLUG SuSe 7.2 CDs and manuals - the
CDs are old, but the manuals might be handy.
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