[ltp] Re: Preferred distro for Thinkpads?

[Daniel Pittman]

James Knott <james.knott@rogers.com> writes:
> Daniel Pittman wrote:
>> James Knott <james.knott@rogers.com> writes:
>>>Jaime Iniesta wrote:
>>>>Thanks everybody, I'm happy with FC4 despite the fact it takes 2 minutes
>>>>to start on my PC, due to all the services it starts at boot time.
>>>>
>>>>I'll try Debian on the Thinkpad, not because I'm not happy with FC4, but
>>>>because I want to try another distro, just to learn about it.
>>>Last week, I installed Debian on a Toshiba notebook.  After that
>>>experience, I'm glad I run SuSE.
>> 
>> In the vague hope of doing something useful in this thread, what
>> problems did you run into?  That way, maybe Debian can fix them and you
>> can have a less painful experience next time. ;)
>
> Not so much problems, as it's very crude compared to SuSe.  For example,
> I was installing on a computer that had one huge (100 MB) partition for
> Windows.  In SuSE, the partitioner can shrink such a partition to make
> room for the Linux install.  Instead, I had to exit the install and then
> boot with my trusty, rusty system rescue CD, to run qt-parted.  After I
> had made space, I then had to restart the install.  

OK - I agree here.  Even with the new installer, Debian is not quite as
sophisticated as some of the commercial vendors.  The installer team are
working on it, but that doesn't much help you. :)

> Then once Debian was up and running, I couldn't find any tool, similar
> to Yast, for configuring the system.

Yup.  Debian has a few tools for doing management with a GUI interface,
but it doesn't have a default one.  It does make it easy to work with
the files in /etc, and the various desktop environments have their own
internal configuration stuff, but no YaST globally required equivalent.


I guess it was just different expectations, then.  Debian doesn't have a
policy of supplying point-and-click tools to do administration by
default, but allows you to use any of the packaged tools if you wish.

Personally, I like this, because my experience with tools like YaST has
been less than ideal.  OTOH, I mostly work on servers, not workstations.


You may want to look to Ubuntu which, apparently, has resolved some of
these Debian issues.  I have not used it, so can't really comment.

Regards,
        Daniel