seeking distribution advice

Forum: Other Help Topics
Topic: seeking distribution advice
started by: mohoohoo

Posted by mohoohoo on Sep. 14 2005,07:57

Hello,
Last week I was lucky enough to get my hand on about 20 DELL Optiplex G100s and G110s. The specs of these machines vary though the lowest specked machine has is a PIII 500 Mhz machines with 128MB and 5GB hard drives.
What I am trying to do is build the machines with some sort of OS and application suite that would suit a novice computer user that needs to write documents, communicate by email, and research on the internet in addition to being easy to look after and keep healthy and stable. The reason I want to build the machines like is that I am trying to send them to Bangladesh to be used in community organizations, health centers, and small offices supporting advocacy work etc.
I've tried Linspire and Ubuntu - Ubuntu is yet to install at all and though I have Linspire installed on one machine it didn't take to my other test machine and the machine it is running is running pretty slow with the all the graphics etc.
I wrote to Ladislav at Distro Watch and he had some great advice and ideas. I checked out DAMM Small Linux and Puppy Linux, on Ladislav's recommendation, and also checked out Chubby Linux. I thought Chubby Linux but have been advised that DSL might be easier to update in the long run.
What do you think of DSL? Good I guess as you made it but I my question is really is it secure, stable, sensible? I looked at the applications in the screen shots I came across and the GUI looked quite simple and so I was thinking perhaps the applications on the distribution were old versions. Is this right? For some things it might not be a problem if they are old versions but if, for instance, the browser was old and didn't handle Flash and a user in Dhaka tried to access a web page that used Flash it wouldn't work and so they would be stuck with some cryptic error message and wouldn't know what to do; as you would appreciate this is just one possible scenario of many.
Still what came to mind as I thought about Chubby and DSL is how fast and easily they would run on even the lowest specked machine I have here. What would you say if I said that I was thinking to put DSL on all the computers? Do you think it wise, silly, limited, hard to use, the wrong choice, a good choice for what I am trying to do, for who will use the machines, for the totally unsupported environment the machines will be used in? I wonder? The plan, at this point, is to build the machines with some sort of OS and application suite that would suit a novice computer user that needs to write documents and share documents with the wider world (which generally use MS Office), communicate by email, and research on the internet. The build would be easy to look after and keep healthy and operate stably as the end users could be street children, health workers, advocacy workers, school children, etc. There is a big possibility (given I've got about 20 machines) that the machines would be networked in groups of 5 or so and share an internet connection and a printer? Can DSL handle being networked like this? How well, or not, do you think that DSL suits this project and meets the needs of this sort of end user community. One of my concerns is what happens if they want to print, or put in a CD, or, as I used my creative writing skills above to describe, if they go to a Flash website and the browser doesn't handle it - they wont know what to do and will be stuck without support.
I think your distribution is very clever and would really appreciate your frank thoughts and ideas on how it may or may not suit what I am trying to do here. Any further suggestions how best I can progress and sustain this project are also welcome.
Cheers,
Adrian
b/w Also, can DSL run from a little USB flash memory stick (like my iShuffle)???

Posted by adssse on Sep. 14 2005,12:32

I have limited knowledge compared to many here, but I think dsl would make a great choice for your needs. It should run very well on the systems you have described. I am using it on a 233mhz with 128mb right now and it runs very nice.
There are many different installs that dsl supports for you to look into, but I think you would be best served with a frugal install. It uses the compressed image on one partition and a second partition for your extensions, /home, /opt and backup/restore. By doing this it becomes virtually bulletproof. Say one of your users accidentally makes a mistake and messes something up. You simply reboot to have the os in a fresh state, while it still saves your files and settings. It is truely remarkable. This is kinda the general idea, by searching the forums for 'frugal' you will find much more.
As far as security, I use the bootcode 'dsl secure'. There is also an extension for a firewall. Not sure how much security you are looking for, since linux tends to be fairly secure anyway.
The apps in dsl are not all the most current. From what I understand there are different reasons for this. Newer apps can be slower, are larger and can be less friendly to old hardware. But I havent really had any problems with the versions in place. Ontop of that there are many, many extensions of applications, some of them newer versions of apps that are on dsl already.
As for the networking and sharing a printer, I dont have any experience with this but I dont see why it cant be done.
Hope this helps some.

Posted by Your Fuzzy God on Sep. 14 2005,15:08

I total agree with adssse; and as far as flash support goes, apps-->net-->browsers-->get firefox flash plugin. No compiling or anything! Just run that once and you are good to go. There are also OpenOffice packages, Samba packages, and just about anything else you would need.

My advice would be to download a few of these distros and set them up how you like. Get a couple of kids to use the different computers and get some feed back from them. See which one was easiest for them to use. Weigh that against the security features and stabailbity over time and I think you will see that a DSL frugal install might just be your best bet.

Posted by mohoohoo on Sep. 15 2005,08:10

Thanks for everyone's help here. You have been great and I appreciate your support. I have chosen to go with Puppy Chubby at this stage as it has Open Office and a few other things that I think will be quite handy.
If you have any advice for the project (how to make it work well, what to look out for, anything at all) please message me through the forum.
Thanks a million,
Adrian

Posted by cbagger01 on Sep. 16 2005,03:46

DSL will work well with those machines.

However, the CDROM drives may have problems with DMA enabled. Mine had errors with DMA enabled.

Assuming that they have the integrated TNT graphics cards, the xfree86.dsl and nvidia.dsl extensions will speed up graphics performance if needed.

There is an openoffice UCI extension for DSL that people seem to like.

DSL is small and modular, so if you try and compare the base installation to a larger linux distribution, it will not have the larger applications preinstalled. However, it is easy to install many of them via the myDSL repository, or via APT-GET or SYNAPTIC.

However, if you are looking for a more full-featured "canned" distribution that is easy to use for beginners, I suggest that you get KNOPPIX and do a hard drive install. If you wish to use a MSWindows-like window manager but you don't want to be bogged down by the slowness of KDE, you can boot with:

knoppix desktop=icewm

and performance should improve.

Either way, (DSL or KNOPPIX) you can't go wrong.

Posted by mohoohoo on Sep. 16 2005,05:55

thanks for the info. i've made a decision on a small distribution for the moment and will see how that goes. it's good to know of the options though so i appreciate your effort.
any advice as to how i can get the most for this project is alway greatly appreciated. at the moment i am thinking about how to partition the drives and how to manage the data if the computers are networked. i am also thinking how to make it secure and usable for many users.
i am also thinking about Samba and backup and how best to offer users space to work in that is accessible, secure, stable, and backed up.
cheers,
adrian
b/w of there are two more things i am thinking of - VoIP for these small distributions and also if there is a very simple server that i can set up to share internet and file space and printing to the computers.

Posted by Your Fuzzy God on Sep. 16 2005,14:56

For a VOIP program I would use Skype. For a server, anything with a good samba client should be able to share the internet and disk space.

Good Luck!

Posted by good server on Sep. 16 2005,22:28

thanks for that. do you have any recomendation for a good server. an easy one, but a great one. what about a debian install or something like that or is there something out there that is super superb?!?!?
cheers,
adrian

Posted by cbagger01 on Sep. 19 2005,05:20

Just about any Linux distribution that comes with Samba or can install Samba will be a good file server system.

DSL has a samba extension that can be installed and configured by editing the configuration text file.

If you don't want to edit text files, you can use KNOPPIX and the Samba windows networking that is integrated into the KDE window manager/desktop environment. It works similar to MSWindows explorer, IE: click on a directory from within the file manager a choose to "share" it.