[Cbsupport] Which Distro?

[David Robb]

On Mon, 21 Jun 2004 02:26 pm, Roland Bernett wrote:
> One group who love
> tinkering with Linux will say Debian is the best for CB purposes. It can
> be configured to run well on a PII - 200 BUT Debian has poor to very
> poor hardware support and can cause a lot of angst. My advice is steer
> clear of this distribution - the community support can be variable
> depending on the personality of the person you are dealing with. As an
> example of great hardware recognition Lindows (now Linspire) is amazing
> - it seems to be able to recognise most hardware (video, monitor and
> network) as it is trying to be as good as Windows XP and will get you on
> the internet almost painlessly. Except for a brief period of time in the
> past, it is now not a free product.

I think you underestimate the hardware support in Debian. Based on my 
experiences, it's mainly new hardware you have to worry about. I know I've 
never owned a computer that has hardware Debian can't deal with.

Due to the non-free status of Lindows, as well as various other issues 
including security, I'd personally recommend against that.

Another option that Computerbank Victoria has been toying with lately is 
Knoppix. It's a very user friendly Debian-based distro with excellent 
hardware support designed to run completely from a CD without any need for a 
hard drive, but it can be installed to hard drive if you like. It does have 
its downside; the hard drive install requires a hard disk partition larger 
than 2GB, and the entire system is copied from the CD, including quite a lot 
of packages that aren't really necessary for a computer being sent out by 
Computerbank. Once you go through and remove all the unnecessary stuff, it's 
quite well-suited for Computerbank use.