Two distributions rejected.

[vakkotaur]

I tried to install Peanut Linux on icelandic and had some trouble. The latest version, 9.6, needs 140MB RAM to install, rather than the 64MB as claimed on the Peanut web site. Further, 9.6 is beta, according to a few forum entries. So I went and got the not so well mirrored 9.5 and that could install. But every time it had a chance to impress me, it ticked me off instead. It wants to be small and light, but can't because it's too busy being coolkewl. So I decided after trying to whack it into shape that it wasn't worth the effort.

I tried BeatrIX which is meant to be a super simple LiveCD with a graphic interface so friendly Aunt Flo could use it and never know she wasn't running Windows. It's a wonderful idea - for faster hardware and a faster CD drive. But it could be installed to hard drive, which would bypass the slow CD drive and let me create a proper user account. This was slow going as it was several seconds from key-press to response due to the slow CD drive I have. But I did get it installed, eventually.

BeatrIX is a Debian/Ubuntu derivative with pretty much everything not needed for the graphic desktop stripped out. A couple things bugged me. First, the wonderful autodetection found my serial trackball and lit up the LED in it.. for a moment, and then decided that the pointing device was an unused (and disabled in the BIOS) PS/2 port. Second, the window manager was gnome - and even on the hard drive it was slow. Fine, I'm willing to blame my ancient hardware there - but it shouldn't slow down the console response in another virtual terminal, at least not so as I notice it.

After the HDD install, the network had to be brought up manually. And I wanted to edit something. Console editor, what's a console editor? The thing, so help me, didn't even have vi ! I'm no fan of vi but its one redeeming feature is that it's always there - until BeatrIX, evidently. I tried other editor possibilities and had just as little luck. After more struggling to tell it about the network and the outside world, apt-get was finally working. And then I tried to look something up with man and it wasn't there. It's not that the man page I sought wasn't there, man itself was missing! Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot. No console editor and no man ? What else does it not have? I've decided I don't care. I'm not wasting any more time fiddling with a deplorably incomplete distribution.

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Addendum: Excluding vi isn't a problem by itself. Not having an editor is a problem. It would be really nice if trying to invoke vi (which is the nearly universal fallback editor) would run a simple script to tell the operator what the installed editor is. It shouldn't start the other editor, just tell a person about it.

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