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Re: Question for Mike Carter Re: Anyone else going to switch to Fedora?
de Mark Carter 04/13/2006 11:02
Brian wrote:
> Mike, What would be the better solution for a newbie into Linux for
> older PIII laptop? I have Looked at Kabubtu and Puppy both look
> interesting. What are the pro and cons? Any direction you could point me
> towards would be helpfull.
>
> Thx.
> Brian Carter
I'm assuming that by Mike you mean Mark, and by Kabubtu you mean Ubuntu.
I tried Puppy once, and it was fast. However, I couldn't get it to
install on my system. It seems that they're working on it - but this
feature didn't exist the last time I tried it. I'm not particularly keen
on Live CDs, because ultimately there doesn't seem much point to them
(OK, maybe possibly perhaps they're useful as emergency recovery tools,
but I wouldn't want one as my main distro).
Puppy is only 60M in size, so if you want to give it a go and find out
you don't like it, at least it didn't take too long to download. My
thoughts on the visual appeal of Puppy is that it is very icky looking -
a sick Puppy, if you will. Their website seems to have a style to match.
IIRC, their Window Manager is built on FVWM, which many people love. But
I'm not one of them.
Puppy does have the advantage that it's quite speedy. However, I expect
that you'll eventually end up wanting more softw2are than is provided on
the CD.
Which brings us onto Ubuntu. Ubuntu is an excellent distro. Other people
on this board have been evangelising MEPIS. I tried SimplyMEPIS version
3.3.1-1 recently. It installed OK. I tried to install extra development
packages, but came across installation conflicts. For this reason, I
think Ubuntu is better.
Upsides of Ubuntu are that there are a tonne of packages available for
it, and hardware detection is good. Disadvantages of it are that it's
not especially fast, I hadn't quite sussed out how to get a Samba server
working on it (although I'm ready to give it another shot, and have an
idea what I was doing wrong), and I don't like that whole sudo business.
I think Ubuntu is the best distro out there (with Slackware second). If
you're worried about the speed of your laptop, then you may want to
consider Xubuntu:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Xubuntu
which is Ubuntu but uses the XFCE windows manager, a less bloated
manager than Gnome.
Dapper Drake is on the horizon (due out end of June, I believe), at
which time I'll probably download Kubuntu and give it a spin.
Hope that helps.