More Linux ramblings.

[vakkotaur]

Last night masem pointed out that /. mentioned a LiveCD Roundup article and yakko quipped that I'd likely tried them all. Not quite, but I have tried a couple of them (Beatrix, knoppix), tried a few that weren't mentioned (DeadCD, Feather, Vector) . A couple that I have yet to try look interesting. I might try PCLinuxOS and Mandrake Move on a faster machine now. And I might have a look at FreesBie and consider running a BSD.

For an older machine (the target machine is a P-166 with 64MB RAM) I'll probably have a look at SAM though it seems to want a much faster machine, alas. Also, I'm not sure how much is nur auf Deutsch. I'm not really looking for LiveCDs - I've found a few that are good or at least acceptable as LiveCDs, but lousy as hard drive installs, and I'd rather not run from the CD drive.

It's frustrating that of all things I've tried for slower machines, the snappiest and easiest seems to be DeLi even with its goofy quirks and old kernel. I seem to have been quite lucky in starting with that one on a P-90 where it's reasonably snappy.

I suppose my ideal low-end distribution would get the hardware detection right for both network (and ask me about how I wanted it set up) and pointer (knoppix and many of its descendants seem determinedly stupid about insisting I have a ps/2 mouse when I have no such thing). It would have a light window manager. It doesn't have to be icewm, but the implementation I've seen of fluxbox has left me biased against fluxbox. KDE is a stretch at the absolute best and gnome is right out. It would install to hard drive whether LiveCD or not and understand that a hard drive install is likely a multi-user system. It need not launch into graphical mode by default. I can type startx or edit a .profile file. It should have an editor that I don't have to guess about. Invoking vi should either bring up vi or tell me what editor is there. It should have sshd. It should have a small, fast browser such as Dillo and maybe have Firefox in reserve. It should have gcc or an easy way to get it. And, ideally, is should not be based on Debian unless there's a GNU-strip script or such to run to go in and repair all the annoying "GNU/Linux" mentions to be the proper "Linux" alone. I know it won't change runtime behavior, but it would remove a big irritant. If I wanted GNU/something, I'd wait for Hurd. I'd consider a Slackware derivative (as DeLi is) though I'd rather have something with real package management. That pretty much means RPM based stuff for a Linux. And it should run reasonably fast on a P-166 with 64MB RAM. Not super-fast, but I shouldn't feel like I'm using a remote system over a lagged connection when I'm sitting right in front of it. Oh, and while I'm going on about things, have information on the web site about what the minimum requirements are. Many times it's not clear what that is, and the only source is a hopefully not outdated listing on Distrowatch. At least then I know if it's aimed at i686 systems and I can stop considering it for older hardware.

It might sound picky, but it's amazing to me that there are so many distributions (and a good many claim to be good minimal things) and yet none of them seem to be quite right. Or at least I haven't found the right one. I suppose I should read back and compile a list in a single LJ entry as a personal review of the stuff I've tried.