I just want to drop my 0.001 cent in here. The company I work for just bought one of the dells with linux preinstalled. it was redhat by the way. the first console does come up with x-windows, but you can change to another virtual console and get a text login. I had to configure it as a ppp server, and it wasn't an easy task. redhat isn't the most friendly linux distribution to work with. i agree with others here, stick with slackware. I run 4 machines with slackware at home,and hav never had a problem. whereas at work, I must use redhat, and seem to have problems installing any package that doesn't happen to come in an rpm package. and, i wasn't overly impressed with the dell machine either. it came as a desktop machine, and didn't seem to be very upgradable. although this may have been the fault of the i t person that ordered it. phil On Sat, Sep 30, 2000 at 02:27:12PM -0600, Charles Hallenbeck wrote: > > On 2000-09-30 speakup at braille.uwo.ca said: > >Hi > >This is mearly my own personal experiences, but I think you'd be > >better off with slackware. I have gotten debian to install, but > >it's a somewhat tricky process. I tried it recently, though, and it > >wouldn't boot correctly on the upgraded machine. I kept getting the > >message init: respawning too fast, disabled for five minutes. I > >don't know what this means, but slackware does not seem to do this. > >I've always been able to install slackware flawlessly and am > >happily running it perfectly. The good side of debian, assuming you > >get it to work, is the package manager. It handles packages very > >nicely indeed, certainly better than rpm or any other packager. > >dependencies are taken care of for you automatically, and you can > >upgrade the whol thing through the net with two commands. However, > >I've found slackware to be more convenient, especially it's init > >structure. I find the system V init-style scripts used by debian > >and red hat annoying. Slackware has about four scripts, which you > >edit manually. Debian's number varies depending on how many > >packages you install, and then you need to worry about symlinks. I > >hate the runlevel directories, there's symlinks all over the place. > >Six directories to manage instead of one. I know debian has > >update-rc.d, but it has failed me before. Slackware also has System > >V init capability in version 7.0 and later, which is useful if you > >install some commercial software that expects this init style, but > >the main init is through four scripts, sometimes five. What I find > >most annoying about debian, however, is the fact that you can't > >edit /etc/mailcap manually. It just gets overwritten. You need to > >go in and create a file in /usr/lib/mime/packages containing the > >lines and then run update-mime. However, you can't name the file > >anything, it needs to be the name of an already installed package. > >This does not apply to any other distribution I know of. Of course > >the problem with this is that if that package wants to place its > >own version of a file there, it will and if your options are set > >wrong, will do this without warning you. You may get asked, or you > >may not. It depends. Jacob > >On Sat, 30 Sep 2000, Charles Hallenbeck wrote: > >> Hi Jacob... > >> I am torn between upgrading to a current Slackware or switching > >>to Debian. I have not talked to Dell yet so I do not know what > >>what distro they have built in. I am really tired of messing with > >>kludgy hardware and a solid platform would be nice for a change. > >_______________________________________________ > >Speakup mailing list > >Speakup at braille.uwo.ca > >http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup > Jacob - > Those are helpful observations. I have only used Slackware in the past - > 2.0, 3.0, 3.5, and now 4.0, so I know its structure pretty well and may just > stick with it. It is the awkwardness of upgrading that tempts me to switch. > Chuck. > > > _______________________________________________ > Speakup mailing list > Speakup at braille.uwo.ca > http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
