[ale] Simple Desktop Distro for Remote Windows user

[BruceG]

On Thursday 02 October 2003 10:04, James P. Kinney III wrote:
> Always good setting up family computers! OpenOffice.org hit 1.1
> yesterday. I got lucky and nabbed a download before the Slashdot
> posting. It is a good upgrade!
>
> RedHat has a no cost RHN subscription that only requires taking a survey
> about every 3-6 months or so. Since this won't be a server, the security
> upgrades will not be that critical. For $60 they can happen
> automatically for a year.
>
> The RedHat Manuals are excellent! Suse's manuals are also excellent.
> There are loads of books for RedHat. I don't see nearly as many on Suse.
> I expect that would be different in the EU.
>
> Earthlink is pretty much everywhere. I'm sure there are other smaller
> ISPs in the PA area. You would need to chat with some LUG people about
> their quality. Here is link to a list of 'em.
> http://www.colug.net/lugs.php#PA
>

You know, James - you gave me an entirely different way of looking at this. I 
had been thinking absolutely no Red Hat as I haven't messed with it and 
didn't realize security updates are free if you do the survey.

I did realize that there are a TON of Red Hat manuals and guides available. 
There is a lot of good information out - and that is critical if you want to 
do things yourself. I also realized that she would stand a much greater 
chance of finding people familiar with Red Hat locally. Probably less of a 
chance finding people familiar with other distributions. So it should be less 
of what I want to do, and more of what she can run and find help for locally 
if she runs into problems.

Think it's time for me to look a little closer at RH. The company I work for 
also allows people to install a secure version of RH on their PC's, and I've 
avoided it to date (it's one thing to hack up my own desktop - it's an 
entirely different matter if I hack up my "bread and butter" laptop). I MIGHT 
try backing up the laptop to my desktop and installing RH in dual-boot mode. 
Unfortunately, RH9 is not supported, I'd have to go with 7.2. But that would 
go against my own policy of never never never messing with anything on the 
work laptop. You never want a PC problem when a project is due.

(maybe I'll just try it on my desktop - if I hack it, it's not critical)