Pete Theisen wrote:
> Chad Perrin wrote:
>
>> Pete Theisen wrote:
>>
> <snip>
>
>> Are you talking about the Mozilla suite email component? If so, you
>> might take a shot at Thunderbird (also made by Mozilla, but a
>> stand-alone client). It has the ability to organize mail by threads.
>>
> Hi Chad!
>
> I tried to install Thunderbird on MEPIS, but I couldn't. MEPIS sucks,
> but not as much as RH 8, Mandrake, SUSE, Caldera . . . At least MEPIS
> will use the hardwired Toshiba winmodem ROFL. Now if I could just print,
> hear sounds, write to floppies, install applications - picky, picky . . .
>
> Why can't we get a distro that just works?
>
> Regards,
>
> Pete
>
Wow. This only just arrived in my inbox, in case you're wondering why I
didn't respond to it earlier.
Ahem.
I actually find that, as LiveCD distributions go, MEPIS rules. What
you're failing to understand is that MEPIS is designed primarily with
LiveCD operation in mind. Installation to the hard drive is sort of an
afterthought (or at least, so it seems), though a far better implemented
"afterthought" than hard drive installation is for most LiveCD distros.
As a result, you're probably going to find a lot of difficulty involved
in getting the system to work in a non-default manner. If you want
something more user-configurable, try SuSE 9.x instead. It's extremely
user friendly, very GUI intensive, and (as I mentioned) far more
user-configurable than MEPIS is likely to be.
This, of course, assumes that by "just works" you mean "installs a bunch
of shit so that I don't have to make many decisions", like the Windows
way of doing things. Notice that in Windows you get IE and OE, and if
you want Firefox and Thunderbird you have to get them yourself. The
same is true of a distribution like SuSE (or Fedora, or Mandrake, or
whatever). A "user friendly" distro in the tradition of massive default
installs with all the bells and whistles preconfigured is going to have
to operate on a set of assumptions about what the user is going to want.
Those assumptions will never match the truth 100%. It's the price you
pay for preconfigured software. You'll have to learn to live with that
fact.
If you want something truly, entirely flexible, you need a minimalist
distro by default that allows for easy addition of the tools you want.
That's why I use Debian GNU/Linux rather than one of the "kitchen sink
distributions". The default install for Debian give you a tty, and
that's about it. Using apt-get, you can install pretty much anything
under the sun, and do so extremely easily. In short order, you can go
from no OS at all to a smoothly-running, powerful workstation with
exactly the OS environment you want. There's a price, though:
You have to learn to make use of the apt system, and you have to
configure a few things the "hard way". In short, you have to deal with
a steep learning curve to get to a point where working with one of these
lean distros is second-nature. Debian isn't point and click.
MEPIS is. MEPIS is point and click because it makes decisions for you.
If you think that MEPIS is any less point and click than Windows simply
because it didn't support sound on your system out of the box, you
should try dealing with the Windows XP Professional SP2 system that a
client of mine had. See, with SP2 on it, it didn't recognize the driver
for the SATA controller as valid any longer. Suddenly, a production
environment workstation went from humming along happily to being nothing
but a paperweight (and maybe, the next time we tell this client that he
shouldn't install something, he'll listen).
So. That's my ramble on the subject. Carry on.
-- Chad ----------------------------------------------------------------------- This list is provided as an unmoderated internet service by Networked Knowledge Systems (NKS). Views and opinions expressed in messages posted are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of NKS or any of its employees.
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