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On Thu, 02 Dec 2004 18:55:27 +0000 Tom Brough <tombrough@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Mandrake / Suse for users who like Multi Media with their distros / new user. Note however Suse bundle non-free packages (not sure about Mandrake)
I'm almost certain that the 3CD Mandrake install (ISOs from the Internet) doesn't have software that isn't either FLOSS or Mandrake's own. I think the boxed sets may contain non-FLOSS/Mandrake softwares, such as the NVidia drivers, etc. The issue of the Contribs set and/or "Penguin Liberation Front", however, is a different one.
Debian if you want to be sure about the freedom aspect / be part of the community spirit, but several personal run-ins with the distro have left me shy - everyone is raving about ubunto so perhaps I should give it another go. But the fact that I have never got debian to install functional X straight from the disks leaves me cold. If you havent guessed I have a love /hate relationship with Debian ... Id love to have it but I hate installing it.
Have you tried it recently? I had a go many moons ago (I think it was about 3) and it was truly nasty (I had only installed Mandrake (several times) until then). The new installer that comes with Sarge (Testing release, soon to be the new Stable) is really good. If you'd not done so in a while, I'd give it another go.
Linspire is commercial - nothing wrong with that, I come across plenty of people who think that FLOSS is no good because you dont have to pay for it. Tell them it will cost them £££££ and dont tell them its FLOSS and they will happily buy the disk off you ... go figure that one ! If they want to pay £££ let them but I wont ;-) and at the end of the day the Linspire guys are smiling (all the way to the bank me thinks) Good luck to them, however I think there days are somewhat numbered.
Curious, isn't it? I seem to recall in interview with someone at Sun and they said that basically people in general, and corporations in particular, have a *really* strange view on value, hence Sun's fairly liberal approach to scaled licensing of StarOffice... ie, you buy 100 licenses of StarOffice because you have 100 employees, but you can install it on as many machines as you like - your employees may need to use SO at home to be productive, and since the license is for the employee to use the software, rather than the software being used on a particular machine, you can install it many times over with the same license. At least I think that's the way the article went...
For thoes that like to get close to the software / hardware Gentoo or LFS.
Or Slackware. Seems to get forgotten these days, which is a shame. Grant. -- Artificial intelligence is no match for nuratal stidutipy. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG Mail majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe list" in the message body to unsubscribe.