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On Thu, 2004-12-02 at 16:25, Paul Sutton wrote:
Hi My friend who runs farseerenterprises (www.farseerenterprises.com)in torbay wants to produce a line of PC's running Linux. He was thinking of Linspire, and asked me if it was suitable (Not having used it I am unsure) However I said that Mandrake was good for beginners, What do people think, I also said that it really depends on the user. So what do people think would be a good idea. I have fecora core 3 from the Linux magazine cover dvd, however this is currently with the technician at the college. I guess what version of Linux you use depends on the user, and what he / she wants to use Linux for. Paul -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG Mail majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe list" in the message body to unsubscribe.
Mandrake / Suse for users who like Multi Media with their distros / new user. Note however Suse bundle non-free packages (not sure about Mandrake) RedHat / Fedora for commercial (although Fedora should always be treated as somewhere between beta and production release). I think Fedora is 100% free of royalty based licensing. 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. 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. MySQL do the same (although they give you more choice) if you want to go it alone heres the code ... if you want support heres write a cheque and heres your contract. At the end of the day you have to eat sleep and have shelter. For commercials with low level needs shared among multiple users that need the same (or near same) desktop functionality LTSP. Low maintenance good "bang for your buck" factor. RH / Fedora has always been faithful to me where LTSP is concerned. For schools with similar needs (similar standard desktop) above K12LTSP, although choice of MultiMedia packages is limited ... Wine can help sort of but not always. For thoes that like to get close to the software / hardware Gentoo or LFS. For demos Knoppix For demos to schools Freeduc (Knoppix with educational slant). For demos of free software for thoes that cant be bothered to set there bios up for boot from CDROM or just dont want to know about anything other than widows (no thats intentional) give them "The Open CD" (at least its a step in the right direction). But please try to (gently) persuade you local school to give at least one of the above a try. I know it hasn't got me anywhere yet but I keep trying. For other needs there is always that slightly different distro that someone wants / likes / will package. All the above of course are based on / derived from and lovingly nurtured via GNU/Linux/FLOSS. Truely a "man for all seasons". Thats enough from me. Tom. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG Mail majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe list" in the message body to unsubscribe.