[NBLUG/talk] recommendations for distro

Kyle Rankin kyle at nblug.org
Fri Nov 21 11:33:00 PST 2003


On Fri, Nov 21, 2003 at 11:15:51AM -0800, E Frank Ball wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 20, 2003 at 07:33:46PM -0800, Mike Egan, ME wrote:
[snip]
> 
> } However, the Debian Installed (default) tends to be more difficult to use
> } than the RedHat installer
> 
> 
> Has anybody tried using knoppix to install and then "converting it" to
> debian?   I used a Knoppix CD to get my X11 configured on a Debian
> system, but I had to cut and paste in the fonts section from a Debian
> XF86Config file because it was pretty different and the knoppix version
> didn't work on a debian box.
> 
[snip]
> -- 
> 
>    E Frank Ball                frankb at efball.com

I've tried out the knoppix hard drive install at various stages in the
game.  You basically are getting a debian sid install (really it just
copies the CD onto a hard drive to oversimplify it), except that knoppix
relies on a good number of experimental apt sources to get newer X packages
and the like.  It all really depends on which knoppix version you get at
which time, since the sources.list file changes in different versions as
packages are either moved to sid proper, or change locations.

My recommendation if you install Debian sid via Knoppix, is to get the very
latest version of Knoppix you can find, install it, and then go into your
/etc/apt/sources.list and audit which experimental sources it uses (and
which you need), then prune what you don't need before you run your next
apt-get upgrade.   Or, you could simply take away all the experimental
sources and then for the most part your system would resemble Debian sid
(as it got newer packages than the experimental ones you would have
installed currently).

-- 
Kyle Rankin
NBLUG President
The North Bay Linux Users Group
http://nblug.org
IRC: greenfly at irc.freenode.net #nblug 
kyle at nblug.org



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