[ale] Which distribution (reprise)

[Mike Nelson]

I have a similar collection of OS's - Win95, NT4.0, Debian GNU/Linux, Netware.

It seems to me that Microsoft installs will be increasingly evil in the future a
s it appears that NT is doing something to the other partitions (why?) so I give
up on Lilo. Not because of any attribute of Lilo though, I just know that MS wil
l blow away the boot. I put Loadlin on the Win95 partition as well as a dos flop
py. After the install, boot with the generic kernel, roll your own, and copy it 
down into the Loadlin directory. 
I've heard of saving the Lilo-enabled MBR onto a floppy with dd so that you can 
restore later if you had to re-install the invasive OS (as is likely with NT).  


history:
downloaded Slackware from Shareware South a while ago; bait taken and hook set.
bought Slackware 2.1 hand upped to ELF 1.3.something.
bought Slackware 3.0 and hand upped through 2.1.30.something
downloaded Debian install floppies from ftp.cc.gatech.edu and ftp installed the 
rest although I had to crib from my older system to get PPP to work.

I do not know what to make of dselect. 

Students, here is a test.

1) Compare and contrast the experience of using dselect for the first time with 
recovering from "rm /lib/ld.so*"

2) In the film "Independence Day" Jeff Goldblum was shown to disable an alien ci
vilization by uploading Debian with the choices of UNSTABLE, NON_FREE, and CONTR
IB. The instructions offered "free software" by using "info" and "dselect"
(A)Could this work a second time?
(B)What was the nuke for?

Seriously though, I think that dselect, opaque as it may be, beats the heck out 
of hunting down all the pieces for upping gcc, binutils, the libs and so on. Doi
ng it by hand I sooner or later got a mess to untangle only with "rm -Rf" I'm st
ill studying on Debian, but I like being able to quickly get a consistent system
with all the basics. I can put in the rest of what I want by hand later and to h
eck with the dselect database. I didn't try Redhat because I couldn't figure out
the RedHat site without getting it all - not an option at 28.8. I'm sure it's po
ssible, I just couldn't figure it out back then. Debian lets you select and FTP 
a package at a time after a minimum install. I like that, cheapskate that I am.

Anyway, try the Loadlin. Once it's up you can dd a boot floppy if you prefer. 
 


On 06-Oct-97 Don Allison wrote:
>Thanks to all those who provided me with information about the pros
>and cons of the various Linux distributions.  Several people told me
>that RedHat had a lot of advantages (ease of upgrading, lots of things
>use the package scheme, etc), and others warned me about how tricky
>Debian was to install, so I decided to try RedHat yet again.  This
>time (4.2 instead of 4.0) it actually let me pick and choose what to
>install and the missing pieces catcher proved helpful (I couldn't figure
>out, though, how it decided what to use as the default install given my
>package choices...it didn't make a lot of sense sometimes.)

<snip>

>Any suggestions?  System is Intel-based, with a 500MB drive at address 2
>that holds the Linux root, and 4 partitions on the drive at address 0:
>the first is Win95, the second is NT 4.0 (FAT), the third is Linux swap,
>and the fourth is for Linux miscellaney.  Syquest is address 4 and CD-ROM
>is address 5.
>
>It's gotta be something stupid I'm overlooking, but any hints would be
>greatly appreciated--while it's "fun" to keep reinstalling Linux along with
>the other OS's (don't ask how many times I've had to reinstall NT in a
>week! :-), with the quarter well and truly started, I actually need to
>use the compute cycles to, er, compute for a change!
>
>Thanks!
>don
>
>(My current recommendation for a version of Linux to use is Slackware from
>around fall 95...version 1.2.13(?) was pretty stable and even worked! :-)

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E-Mail: Mike Nelson <mnelson at bellsouth.net>
Date: 06-Oct-97
Time: 21:29:12

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