On Wed, 2008-01-23 at 08:46 -0600, Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote:
> Matthew Saltzman wrote:
> > On Wed, 2008-01-23 at 13:04 +0800, Ed Greshko wrote:
> >> John Summerfield wrote:
> >>> My proposal addresses the cases of no DVD drive but CD, and no good
> >>> networking.
> >> In that case I'm still suggesting that fedora is not the wisest choice of
> >> distro.
> >
> > Why not? And who are you to make that decision for me?
> >
> > I like cutting-edge applications and dev tools. I'm used to RH admin
> > tools. My 1GHz T-Bird is acceptably (though not blindingly) fast with
> > F8, for the things I use it for. The 500MHz P-III in my closet is an
> > adequate home print/backup/network server with F8. Having all my
> > machines running the same version of the OS is a great convenience. The
> > only issue is I need a DVD drive someplace so I can do network installs.
> > I happen to have one in the house[1], but if I didn't and I lived
> > further out in the country (many people out here still have no DSL or
> > cable service!), I'd be SOL.
> >
> > [1] So far, about the only thing it gets used for is upgrading Fedora.
> >
> Nobody is making a decision for you. What is being suggested is that
> Fedora is the wrong choice if you do not have good networking, or
> more specifically, a good Internet connection. Fedora changes too
> fast to try to keep up with if you do not have a fast Internet
> connection. You might manage it on dialup, but you would be tying up
> a phone line for hours at a time. (Update over night?) So you are
> loosing most of the advantages of using Fedora. Add to this the fact
> that the Fedora DVD is less then 1/3 of the packages available from
> the official Fedora repos, even before you add in the third party
> repos, and not having a good Internet connection becomes more of a
> problem.
But even with a slow connection, I could live with updating overnight or
adding one or two packages at a time. And updating or augmenting is
much more robust than installing. A failed update due to a dropped line
can be resumed, but a failed net install leaves me with an unbootable
machine and has to be started again from scratch.
The whole original install is a much bigger load than updates, but if I
could get media I could read (from someplace with a faster connection or
from a distributor of media), I could install it. With older hardware
(not so much older that it can't comfortably run F8, but old enough not
to have a DVD drive) it would be handy to have CDs in preference to a
DVD.
>
> From what I see, Fedora is geared towards having a good Internet
> connection. The way updates and adding software is handled is a good
> indication of this. So even after you get Fedora installed, you are
> going to run into problems if you do not have a good Internet
> connection. This sure sounds like using the wrong tool for the job.
> So it is a valid observation that using Fedora is this case is
> probably not the best choice.
>
> I would love to be able to run Fedora on an old Pentium 75mhz system
> with 40Mb of RAM and an 800Mb hard drive. But it is not practical. A
> better choice is one of the distributions designed to run on low-end
> hardware. The best choice, if I want to keep using it, is to use it
> for something like a firewall, router, or wireless bridge. Maybe a
> print server as well.
Sure--I miss running my Thinkpad butterfly-keyboard i486 laptop as my
firewall. It still has RH 7.3 installed, but it's a bit too slow to
handle my 6Mbps DSL connection. But there's no magic line. I ran F5 or
F6 on a 135MHz Pentium with something like 128MB and a 4GB main drive
until it expired recently. It was a perfectly acceptable print/backup
server. I wouldn't have used it as a desktop, though.
>
> Mikkel
--
Matthew Saltzman
Clemson University Math Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs
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