Re: Upgrade Time Again

[nospam [at] janes.demon.co.uk (Matthew Collins)]

On Tue, 15 Jun 1999 19:05:21 +0100, you wrote:

>sheflug - http://home.freeuk.net/shef.lug
>
>Hi
>
> SuSE 6.1 arrived from the Linux Emporium this morning along with my
>new SuSE Linux tea mug. I got the impression that John Winters had
>run up here from Wallingford on his own two feet to deliver the
>package. Much quicker than usual. I spent an hour or two looking
>through the new 6.1 manual whilst supping a mug of monkey brew (PG
>tips tea). Then I had a look at the SuSE web site. That was when I
>realised that 5.3 and 6.0 had been the better distributions. There
>are so many updates since 6.1 was released that it looks more like
>Windows 98 :-) An update to update the update that updated the last
>update. Red Hat 6.0 is suffering a bit with this as well.
>

That's why I use Debian. They aren't commercial, so they don't have
the same pressure to release early to satisfy the stock holders.
Although some of the releases have been quite buggy, none have been
quite as bad as the latest red hat and suse releases.

> My new Linux box uses an AMD K6-2 3D 450 MHz cpu and has a built in
>8Mb AGP video chip and sound chip. You might well question wether
>the sound chip will work with SuSE 6.1 :-( It's also got 128Mb of
>100MHz NVRAM. Very useful for Star Office :-) Then there's the 10Gb
>hard drive which is useful for some programming work with all of the

Wow. 128MB of Non-volatile ram! :)
I think 10 Gb will keep you going for quite some time. I'm having
trouble filling up 5.6 Gb with Debian (Which has a lot more packages
etc etc, do we see a theme developing here. Isn't distribution
advocacy wonderful)

>programming tools that come with the SuSE distribution. There's also
>extra room for tape drives and CD recorders in the full-tower case.
>The Elsa QuickStep 1000pro-PCI ISDN terminal adapter should help out
>a bit as well.

Mumm. I've been thinking about getting Home Highway soon. Is that what
you're using, or are you using proper ISDN2? The prices seem a bit
over the top, but I can't see any other way of getting a fast internet
connection. All these new technologies that we keep hearing about only
seem to happen in the states. ADSL etc, and over there they don't let
Linux users subscribe anyway! (See recent articles on slashdot.org).

>
> All in all it's nothing fancy but it's much better than the 166MHz
>mini-tower that I was using. All I have to do now is work out why
>the power isn't getting through to the CD-ROM drive and the IBM HD.
>Shouldn't take too long to do that. Then I can install Linux :-)
>I'll be looking forward to the dark nights of winter this year.

I've got my old 166 acting as an Internet gateway now. I've set it up
as a mail server, ppp dial up, dns server for my own little network.
It's amazing what a difference a caching dns server makes to your
internet connection, and it's quite easy to set up. I haven't got IP
Masq. working yet, but I haven't really had time to play with it.

>
> Oh well.... time for another mug of tea. (and what's the cricket
>score ?).

I do like the Suse mugs, I've bought one for work just to wind the
boss up (we're a total microsoft shop here).

--
Matthew Collins

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