[ltp] thinkpad 310ED

[Tod Harter]

Well, Mandrake seems to be about the best desktop distribution around these 
days. Sometimes it has a few rough spots, as they tend to try to be very 
"bleeding edge" with their packages (and they seem to have by far the largest 
selection of packages available, plus 90% of RH 7.x packages work fine on 
Mandrake, which is nice). 

I would NOT really call it a "light" distribution, BUT with 8.x you can 
pretty easily pare it down to a reasonable subset that you can live with. If 
you use just one window manager/desktop and don't install a lot of 
development and server packages you can get an install thats well under 1 
gig. If you really push it you can get it down to around 350 megs (and 
probably much less, but for smaller installs than that I'd go with one of the 
micro distros). 

I have been running Mandrake 7.2 and 8.0 on a 380D and an A20p for a few 
months now. 8.1 is out now, which would probably be the way to go. 

Debian is a great and wonderful thing, but it has 2 major problems. One, its 
a hobbyist effort and doesn't necessarily cater to people's real needs. Take 
for instance the BS with Debian and KDE. That was just dumb. Personally I 
don't trust the Debian people to put first priority on user needs over some 
kind of philosophical mumbo-jumbo I could care less about. 2nd its just NOT 
that easy to run. Eventually you can make it work very slick, but its 
packages tend to be way out of date and it doesn't give you much in the way 
of easy admin tools. 

On Saturday 20 October 2001 12:55, you wrote:
> hello
> well, i have been goin threw my test of different setups on my thinkpad
> 310ed, seeing which distributions seem to work ok with it.  redhat 7.0 is
> not a prob, though you need to very carefully tweek the XF86Config file,
> which i have done unsucesfully a few times and fried stuff, haah...
>
> mandrake 8.0 goes on very easily, and is easy to edit the XF86Config as
> well, but i have been stumped gettin a modem to work on it as well as the
> net card...
>
> slackware, forget it, nightmare...could not get it to work on it using the
> cd distribution of 8.0.  but i have an older version which is floppy based
> that i cna put on anything, got it up and running, no X of coarse on an
> old 486 toshiba laptop and a gateway as well...
>
> so now im trying debian, and will give up after this and put redhat 7.0
> back on it...if anyone has any sugestions as to a good distribution that
> is not too heavy, and likes thinkpads, let me know...
>
> dan
>
> ...............................
> Daniel W. Schar
> Dept of Biology (OBEE), UCLA
> 621 Charles Young Dr. South
> Los Angeles, CA 90095-1606
>
>
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