[ale] Distro

[James P. Kinney III]

On Sun, 2005-01-02 at 14:51, Brandon Colbert wrote:
> I am looking for a new distro to use. I am currently a 
> redhat/fedora/mandrake fan, but I want to try something new. The distro 
> has to give free updates, and can be used as a workstation and server. 
> Can I get some feedback on these distro's: FreeBSD, Slackware, Debian, 
> and Gentoo.

If you want to stay in the Linux realm, in order: Slackware, Debian.
Gentoo is solid but very much a PIA to set
up/buildallfromscratchevery#$%&ingtime. Slackware is very much like
old-world unix. Debian has a very solid support community but is slow on
the complete system upgrades. You have to run "testing" to get close to
the current stuff that Slackware/RedHat/et al are using. Is that a good
thing? Sometimes yes, sometimes no.

The big advantage to Slackware is it can be pared down to a very tiny
system with nothing in it but exactly what you want. The only
disadvantage to Slack is it has a much smaller community suppport base
than Debian. It's bigger than Gentoo, however :)

To sum up, both Slack and Debian are well suited for multi-purpose
desktop/server setups. Slack is a bit more geared toward servers and
Debian a bit more toward desktops. 

Gentoo would be good if you had a large number of identical machines to
install to. Do one big emerge/install to one machine and then dd the
drive around to the others. Or maybe rsync. Once you get past about 2
machines, Gentoo is way too slow to install with. Needs _fast_ hardware
for all that compilation.

Load 'em all and see which one you like most. That's the most fun of
Linux :)
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-- 
James P. Kinney III          \Changing the mobile computing world/
CEO & Director of Engineering \          one Linux user         /
Local Net Solutions,LLC        \           at a time.          /
770-493-8244                    \.___________________________./
http://www.localnetsolutions.com

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7
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