[ale] sharing an experience....debian....

[Bjorn Dittmer-Roche]

On Wed, 11 Feb 2004, Keith Morris - IQ wrote:

> Hi all, just wanted to share a quick experience and get your opinions if
> you are willing.
>
> I have been using linux off and on since Redhat 5.1 and exclusively for
> the last 3 years at home.  I have pretty much been a redhat man with no
> complaints.  I use Fedora Core 1 on my 2 main machines at home (both
> 1.6GHz).  Well, recently I got a PIII 866 to play with and installed FC1
> on it and the speed was really quite sluggish.  Played with a few more
> distros which I wasn't really happy with.  Well, I've always been afraid
> of Debian with it's infamous hell-installer, but with it's new Beta
> installer, I decided to try it.

You can use Knoppix as an installer, too, but I think that puts you in
unstable. Anyway, the old installer ain't that bad.

>
> After a pretty painless net-install, I was totally shocked with the
> speed of Debian.  Easily twice as fast as Fedora on the 866 using the
> *SAME* software (Gnome 2.4, KDE 3.1.5, OpenOffice, Evolution, XFT
> support, antialiasing, etc.) I still have not gotten the sound working,
> but believe that I will be able to (with a few posts to the ALE list :))
> The only main difference is that I formatted / with reiserfs instead of
> ext3 with FC1.

There's always something with debian, I have to admit..... RH really has
the install thing worked out.

> I was wondering if anyone could guess why debian would be sooooo much
> faster with basically the same "Desktop" type of configuration? Do many
> of you use Debian?

The kernel might be more suited to your hardware. Things might be compiled
with more agressive optimization. (on my dell laptop, the RH 9 stock
kernel outperforms anything else I've tested, but that's just me.)

> I will probably stick with Debian on this machine to learn about the
> different ins-and-outs.  I absolutely *love* apt-get for debian.  I have
> used it with rpms on redhat, but it seems better with debs...dunno...

COOOOL! I love debian.

	bjorn