[GLLUG] Distro of Choice?

[Ashton Shortridge]

As a bigger Newbie than most here, and one who asks far more questions than he 
answers, perhaps my answer will be enlightening.

I have RedHat 9 (really Pink Tie, but the same thing) on my desktop at work. 
Easy to install, obviously kind of dated and not the easiest thing to 
upgrade. I do have KDE 3.2 running on it, but not after a battle. I think I 
have it running at home on my wife's machine, too. I run a lot of non-distro 
stuff, and am generally as happy or happier compiling than using rpms. Since 
the machine at home is on dialup I will probably get some CDs and install 
something new there before Christmas.

On the advice of this very group, I obtained Libranet (about 2 weeks before 
2.8.1 became free!), and have been very impressed. I installed it on my balky 
notebook, and it worked pretty well. The big problem had to do with the 
display configuration - it's still not quite right, and occasionally X 
crashes, bringing down the system. I think on a desktop machine things would 
have been cake. Libranet's installation was straightforward and the Adminmenu 
tool is very convenient for upgrading and configuring the system - miles 
ahead of RH9. Libranet is basically a flavor of Debian, so the apt- approach 
to upgrading works smoothly too. My beef with it is really just the slow pace 
at which Debian upgrades... and the horror stories on the forums about people 
that lost patience with that slow pace, installed the wrong things from 
unstable, and consequently wrecked their systems. Libranet maintains a 'safe 
upgrade' that borrows as much as possible from Debian's testing and unstable 
to provide a safe and somewhat more up to date system.

I did have Gentoo on the laptop, but I broke it beyond my poor powers to mend, 
hence the move to Libranet.

Ashton