[olug] Distro recommendation

[Christopher Cashell]

At Wed, 24 Nov 04, Unidentified Flying Banana Ryan Stille, said:
> Ideally there is a single CD distro out there that comes with a modern
> kernel and other basics?  Or are all 4 CDs required for Fedora?  I
> remember with Mandrake only the first two out of 3 or 4 CDs were usually
> required.

I'm a big fan of Debian, particularly on a server, so my gut instinct is
to recommend that.  However, Debian is anything but small (as far as
number of available packages. . . the installation itself can be made
quite small if needed), and as they are right in the middle of
preparation for a new release, you're stuck with either an old release,
or a beta release, at the moment.

If you want an easy to install, single CD, setup, I'd suggest Ubuntu.
It's a newish Debian based distribution with a goal of making Debian
usable with an easy installation, and regular (6 month) releases.
Additionally, they've committed to providing security updates for 18
months for every release.

It comes with a default selection of desktop and server software that
will provide for the basic needs of most people, and they have a great
many additional packages available vi apt.  Oh, and despite having a
commercial backer, it's completely free.

As far as it's suitability on older hardware. . . well, I haven't tried
Ubuntu on a comparable machine, but my primary server, which is running
Debian, is a Dual Pentium Pro 200, and it's managing quite well.

> As someone suggested, maybe the best thing to do is use Fedora and turn
> off the extra stuff during the install.

In all honesty, almost any distribution will probably work at least
reasonably well for your needs.  That's the beauty of Linux. . .
flexibility.

> -Ryan

-- 
| Christopher
+------------------------------------------------+
| Here I stand.  I can do no other.              |
+------------------------------------------------+