water cooler :: Testing Linux Distributions

You need the "boot" "root" and "net-drivers" images from

http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian....y

-J.P.

Rapidweather, what things weren't working in Feather at all? No reason why I can't improve... :;):

OK time to fess up I'm a distro junkie too.
Never done downloading & burning distro's - it's a way of life rapidw

DSL's great strength is it's modular structure.
I use different boxes for different tasks and I like each to be as slimmed down and focussed as possible to be as efficient as possible.
Stems from old dos habits.

I noticed that the distros which gotten better reviews than dsl has one thing in common, beautiful desktop. SLAX has NOTHING, just pretty colorful bubble-like icons. MEPIS dont even have vncviewer on 700MB, but has pretty KDE, man!!! just look at that boot up screen!. Morphix is beautiful but is a 700MB distro that dont do centrino!! good grieve!! KNOPPIX used to have ugly "robotic eye" screen if you guys still remember, but users cant stand it. Kanotic is beautiful and alot faster but is too bloated. Beatrix, feather, puppy, morphix, gnoppix are all pretty.. But do they dont have local loadable module?

you gave a good overview. I gave up on a distro once it dont run on my centrino and I wont play with it long if it dont have locally loadable modules; I carry 3 distros in my laptop bag; gamesknoppix, kanotix and dsl. I only use dsl because I hate the sound of cdrom spinning everytime I change pages when browsing web. My laptop is TOTALLY silence because of toram options is feasible on my 512MB ram.

just my 2cents

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Hmmm. I'd like to give this a try. Exactly which 3 images should I download from Debian for an i386 1.44MB floppy install? One link from http://www.debian.org/distrib/floppyinst lists 20 floppy images, and the Debian installation manual at http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/ch-appendix also lists a whole fistful of floppies.

Every Linux distro used to install off of floppies. The reason they migrated to CD's is the unreliable nature of the floppy disk. They tend to go bad for no apparent reason at unpredictable times. Try a netinst iso instead, such as LordSutch's iso. LordSutch's iso is just under 200MB and it'll install a fully running, lean Debian, no network connection required. If you wanna update, hook up the network and change your sources.list to Sarge and apt-get dist-upgrade, no problems.

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Really the only mainstream "full-size" distro that hasn't succumbed to the bloat is Debian. And most people consider it a black sheep among distros.

Technically, Slackware is leaner than Debian. Slackware routinely strips down their executables and has a very "clean", uncomplicated approach to installing the distro. I personally prefer Debian, but Slackware was more responsive on my box than Debian ever has been and with Patrick Volkerding's recent decision to drope Gnome from Slackware 10.1, Slack definitely has my vote.

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