Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on September 13, 2005 03:10 AM
While community is certainly nice, it's not everything. I've spent some time looking at less mainstream distributions in order to run something on older (ok, ancient) hardware. I've had various degrees of success.
I tried DeLi and it's nice, but the last version available as an ISO needs more than a bit of hands-on work to get things set up. Vector Linux which prides itself on working with older machines feels too sluggish to me, Peanut demands more RAM than is available, BeatrIX is wonderfully simple - but not what I desire, DeadCD, Feather, and MEPIS Lite didn't work out well - for me. Now, I'm not saying these distributions are bad - they just didn't work out for me.
Recently I've been using Ultima Linux which, like DeLi, is a Slackware derivative intended for older, slower, machines. It's not the simple whizbang and just go install of Mandrake/Mandriva, but it seems to be working. It needs some hands-on work, but less that DeLi needs. So it works out rather well. For me and my ancient 166MHz machine, anyway.
Trying various distributions has been a learning experience as well. Sometimes I might have given up sooner than others would have, but each time I generally got something out it. I'm no guru nor do I expect to ever be one - but I can tinker (and not worry about breaking my faster main system, which runs Mandrake, for now).
Is it ego to provide yet another distribution? Maybe, but I don't really care - what I want is to get the machinery going so it's at least somewhat useful. If someone gets their ego stroked on the way, what harm does that do?
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Posted by: Anonymous Coward on September 13, 2005 03:10 AMWhile community is certainly nice, it's not everything. I've spent some time looking at less mainstream distributions in order to run something on older (ok, ancient) hardware. I've had various degrees of success.
I tried DeLi and it's nice, but the last version available as an ISO needs more than a bit of hands-on work to get things set up. Vector Linux which prides itself on working with older machines feels too sluggish to me, Peanut demands more RAM than is available, BeatrIX is wonderfully simple - but not what I desire, DeadCD, Feather, and MEPIS Lite didn't work out well - for me. Now, I'm not saying these distributions are bad - they just didn't work out for me.
Recently I've been using Ultima Linux which, like DeLi, is a Slackware derivative intended for older, slower, machines. It's not the simple whizbang and just go install of Mandrake/Mandriva, but it seems to be working. It needs some hands-on work, but less that DeLi needs. So it works out rather well. For me and my ancient 166MHz machine, anyway.
Trying various distributions has been a learning experience as well. Sometimes I might have given up sooner than others would have, but each time I generally got something out it. I'm no guru nor do I expect to ever be one - but I can tinker (and not worry about breaking my faster main system, which runs Mandrake, for now).
Is it ego to provide yet another distribution? Maybe, but I don't really care - what I want is to get the machinery going so it's at least somewhat useful. If someone gets their ego stroked on the way, what harm does that do?
- Vakkotaur
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