Re: [Sheflug] Christmas

[John Southern <john@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Saturday 23 December 2006 15:41, Wonkey Donkey wrote:

> Thats a lot of OS's John !!!

 I was/am a dedicated OS junkie and would/will run almost every single OS that 
is available. There are some 300+ Linuxes of which I think I have tried 200+.
>From my own point of view, they all tend to blur into the same thing with just 
a few tweaks. The real difference is the apps that you want to run.

I like Debian/(K/X/Ed)Ubuntu for home use as the apt-get makes maintenance 
easy.
Work wise it is RHEL and a little Suse, because that is all the major app 
vendors support (Oracle rpms etc).
Current job means I have to sit on Solaris boxes, which is why I have both 
Solarisx86 and SchilliX. Yes I am in the market for both another Ultra10 and 
a PowerPC box, but that might also require more space for storage.
FreeDOS is because I was trying to improve some batch programs and needed to 
test, but that was back in August.
Arc because it is hosted at a local secondary school and I had not previously 
come across it before. (I actually saw a mention of it following one of 
Richards emails in the NYLUG).
SlaX was because I was feeling masochistic one day.
DragonFly is a BSD that let me play with Pkgsrc for package maintaining.
Mandriva has been on the system for years and as I used to talk to Gael, I 
should really run Ulteo (I have Alpha 1 and act as a torrent seed for it, 
hoping to try over the Christmas break).
Fedora is in the vain attempt that I can see where RHEL is going.
Feather, DSL and puppy are used quite a lot as I use them on all old machines 
and on USB sticks.
I have DSL and a windows program called Portable apps on a pendrive that means 
I can run just about everything I need, wherever I am. If I can reboot, then 
the DSL is used (the Sysboot version so it works on all hardware) otherwise 
it is the PortableApps and puTTY)
JohnOS was my attempt at a LinuxFromScratch system and is not intended for 
anything except solving a personal need.

Finding a good OS is hard. I can give lots of reasons of why any particular OS 
is bad. BearOS was fantastic for its printed manual - shame the OS was so 
bad.
Blag was a neat idea from the Brixton LUG and I guess most LUGs should really 
try to build their own as that way it would meet the needs of the group with 
support.

The only OS I never really gave a decent trial was Gentoo. I honestly do not 
know the ins and outs of every package. I am not willing to go through the 
source for every package and so I am reliant on someone's work. I might as 
well trust them to package up something and save me a few hours work. ;-)

At the moment I seem to be stuck with KMail, Konqueror, Gimp, XSane, XChat, 
Firefox, IE4Linux (Don't ask!!), Vi and terminal session. Most are distro 
free, but the Konqueror and Kmail are tying me down to KDE at the moment.
Konqueror is used because I like the fish:// protocol for a drag and drop sFTP 
between workstations.

> Curious you mention Solaris is slow under Vmware. I have never had any
> difficulty with it at all.

Out of curiosity how big is your VM image? Mine is close to 10G and I am 
running it on a 1G Ram box.

> Just for info, I received an email from Vmware this morning, stating that
> there is a beta for version 6.

Got that. It is the Workstation beta 6 and it does finally support my dual 
monitor GX400 graphics card!

Does anyone else have recommendations on distros?
Why do they use a particular one?
What are the few apps that are vital to them?
How can I move away from Konqueror and Kmail?

Regards
John

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