water cooler :: I dont get it
I am a distro junkie. You name it, I have done it, been there done that... but I keep coming back to DSL ..for 2 reasons: I cant watch dvd using other full size distro becozI dont have enough ram for toram to free up my only cdrom drive. and there is no way for me to enable centrino wireless on other minimalist distros.
what i dont understand is how can other people stand fullsized distros? do they have huge rams? dont they watch/listen to dvd/cd? do they have more than 1 cdrom? arent they bothered with the cd spinning and making noise all the time?
how can they stand other minimalist distros? are they contented with the apps offered? arent they curious to try other apps? are livecd just a toy to them or do they use it on daily basis to do real work? how do they hack to enable centrino wireless?
what is it about dsl that they dont like? dont they know that there is nothing that dsl cant do?
ps:
distro tried:
1) overclockix : based on knoppix, has firefox, captive ntfs, Karamba, nomachine, centrino works. But I cant watch dvd becoz its a fullsized distro and frugal install wont cut it coz I only have ntfs partition.
2) kanotix: has lotsa stuffs as above no karamba, has KLIX but its a fullsized
3) knoppix: no firefox
4) feather: very popular but i have no idea why. beautiful desktop, no centrino, no modular apps
5) slax: very popular but I have no idea why. centrino dont work
6) Freesbie (Free BSD livecd) : this aint linux, mount , insmod, modprobe dont work. full sized cd with no centrino driver !!! what are they thinking.. but beautiful desktop
I assume you are referring to liveCD distros only. In that case, yes, I agree that playing DVDs would be annoying. Personally I don't use DSL for such purposes, because I have a full-blown, got-more-features-than-i'll-ever-use, hardrive-installed distribution for real work. DSL is both a toy and a learning tool for me, but not used for serious work or play. It also comes in handy for using other machines which don't have a linux distro already loaded.
I'm going to guess that a lot of people using a larger liveCD such as Knoppix for DVDs, games, and other demanding tasks probably have it installed to their harddrive.
Other options include distros such as Geexbox or Movix, which are so tiny that they can be used as a portable movie player which includes videos on the same disk.
5) Slax is most likely very popular because it's based on what is arguably the best linux distro ever.
FYI,
You can run knoppix and knoppix based distro from an NTFS partition on a hard drive to avoid the cd drive spinning annoyance, but you still need the livecd for the initial bootup.
What you do is, copy the knoppix.iso file over to your C:\knoppix\ directory (in this example, C: becomes /dev/hda1 when you reboot)
Then boot with the livecd and type:
knoppix fromiso=/dev/hda1
and you can remove the livecd after booting is complete.
original here.