It is a great end-user distribution but I wanted to extend it further and ran into problems.
My next try was Suse.
The Suse live cd failed to boot on the old hardware I am using.
Failure at the first hurdle.
Next up was Ubuntu linux.
I have a Warty Warthog CD.
The installer is text based and less polished than the Mandriva version.
However once you have told it what to partition it performs its own install.
It provides the basic items that you need out of the box and installs from one cd.
It is very easy to update using either the gui synaptic package manager or via the commandline apt utility.
Initial it seemed rather slow until I found that it comes with a kernel built for the 386.
It is easy to use synaptic to update to a newer kernel.
I then found out that Hoary Hedgehog the successor to Warty Warthog had been released.
The instructions for this are not very clear to the uninitiated so here is a simple version:
- Open a console as root.
- cd /etc/apt
- chmod +wr sources.list
- emacs sources.list
- replace all references to warty with hoary
- If you want non-official packages uncomment the universe lines (remove the # characters)
- save and close emacs
- sudo apt-get update
- sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
Wait and then you have a Hoary Hedgehog system.
I am trying to get a system with mono installed.
Ubuntu is a very young debian based distribution. With a little polish it looks like it will be a very good system.
Ubuntu is by default a Gnome system compared to the KDE default of Mandriva and Knoppix.
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