On Wed, 2002-10-30 at 00:52, Ronald KA4INM Youvan wrote:
<snip absolute nonsense about Debian and laptops>
>
> I regret that that I don't have a single friend that use LINUX,
A crying shame, but some people like Fords, some like Chevy and some
like Dodge, (insert a multidude of other vehicle brands.)
> let alone use it exclusively, but I have been Slackware 100% from 1997
> and I don't understand:
> Why no one on any list I am on is an advocate of Slack.
> Why no one on any list I am on even mentions Slack.
> What would be so difficult about one distribution compared
> to others?
Refer to my last comment. Maybe silence is golden. Possibly Slackware
is so free of complication, no one mentions it. Hence, you can tout its
greatness.
The only difference I have read of, is the installation programs.
> Why any distribution lacking, say laptop support, cant the user get
> the drivers other distributions use and get going the same?
They are all the same. You merely need to read the man pages or
relevant FAQ from the driver's page if you find yourself perplexed. I
used to be a Red Hat, then Turbo Linux and then finally SuSE flag
waver. I mean flag waver as a person who uses one who prefers one
particular distribution. Then I became irritated when trying to install
tar.gz's and, depending on what distro you were using, you may have to
manually edit the configure file. Out of pure laziness and knowledge of
what drivers I need to run my hardware, I chose Debian. It always works
for what I need. If I want some new clever program, I apt-get it. This
doesn't mean I can't compile what I want from source; its just easier to
apt-get it.
Regarding comments about Debian and laptops: I have run Potato on a
Dell Inspiron 4000 for some time now. I haven't dist upgraded to Woody,
because Potato has always worked for what I want.
To me, Linux is all about what you want. I started using Linux because
I originally was a Commodore VIC 20, then 64 user. I remember my first
shiny 386 20MHz, 4 Megs of RAM and 40 Meg HDD. I remember being angry
with DOS 4.01 when I couldn't run Sim City on this "powerful" beast,
without serious memory tweaking, but could run it on my Commodore 64,
load * 8,1,0 (or something like that,) $200 vice $1,000 machine, with no
tweaking. This taught me, early on, there was something seriously wrong
with MS DOS.
I remember switching from a 2.0.x kernel to the 2.4.0 kernel, because
it had the emu101k drivers built right in and I upgraded from the 8 bit
Sound Blaster I originally had on my 386, 20MHz, an hour and thirty
eight minutes to compile a kernel, oh my God the 2.0.34 kernel is so
much cooler than the 1.0.x, where's my root/boot 5 1/4 floppies box, to
a Sound Blaster Live card on my shiny new Pentium III 500 MHz. I wanted
to hear my mp3's through my Sound Blaster Live Card, and at the time, I
was a monolith kernel lover. So, it was what I needed. I compiled the
beast and used it. The 2.2.x kernel was eventually back ported.
It may gratify you to know, the first distro I ever used was
Slackware. It was stuck in the back of a book (circa 1995) and the
CDROM on my 1x CDROM drive was much better than downloading Linux with
my mighty 14.4 modem. I think it was one of the first distro books for
Linux and I can't remember the title. I just remember it said "Linux"
in big, gold letters on the cover. The first book I purchased about
Linux was "Running Linux" by Matt Welsh and Lars Kaufman. The second
was the distro book with Slackware stuck in the back and the third was
"Linux Undercover." "Linux Undercover" was a Red Hat manual and so I
switched distros. (Heh, at the time, I bought it to help me print with
my crappy Canon 4100 printer!)
Anyway, enjoy Linux. Make it do what you need it to do. If it
doesn't, help make it so. Its what I have done for eight years now and
I find it extremely gratifying. My final comment is this: I always
hear how folks say they wouldn't install Linux for their Grandmother. I
installed Debian Potato, with the Ximian Desktop and some personally
manufactured desktop regalia, for my Grandmother, so she can connect via
modem to the internet, and she uses Mozilla and Evolution for all of her
internet needs, with no complaints from her, just from all the .gov
sites she bombs with her insights... errr maybe like I am doing now.
Heh, goodnight amigos,
The Logan
-- 21:30:01 up 98 days, 14:05, 1 user, load average: 0.86, 0.97, 0.86 http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/stats/team/team_104.html Home of the smartass seti@home Linux users Registered Linux User 277727 ICQ 72101412
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Fri Aug 01 2014 - 17:07:27 EDT