I'd like your input as to which is best.

I'm going to be wiping my HDD after the semester is over since I'm having some trouble with my OS (Yes, it's WinBlows) and was curious which dist was best for my uses. My current configuration:

I have a Toshiba 7140 that uses a docking station.
- 6 GB HDD (Should I upgrade?)
- 190 MB RAM
My home's network is cat-5.
I have a Palm OS PDA that I will need to be able to sync.
At school I use a 802.11B wireless PC Card to connect to the 'net and check email.
My wife has a Windows PC on which all our documents are stored
- This is important since I use "briefcase" to sync new and updated documents to her PC. If Linux doesn't, yet, have an equivalent to this, I'll need a WinBlows partition so that I can do that.

My overriding goal is to have something that I don't have to open the hood on every other day - it just works.

I just installed knoppix 3.7 .. it's very good and easy to install.
I don't think Slack is that easy to get started and I think knoppix pulls in all the "new" stuff .. whether it works or not :=))
But I think knoppix is a better starter env. .. and you can alwasy try it out in 30 minutes compared to half a day for slack.

I take it by your nice "winsnomore" that you were a Windows person for a while. How easy/hard was the transition?

Slack is good if you want to do a lot of configuration on your own, whereas if you don't wanna play around with config files and compiling some software on your own, then go for Knoppix.

I have been a windows person for a long while.
Knoppix was one of the easiest to install, it took less than 1 hour. By far the shortest time between FC/1/2/3 Suse/Mandrake/Debian/Gentoo (a lifetime) and Mepis about same as this.

However there are problems here, nothing that one can't overcome if you want to spend some time (which I am doing now) .. Only reason I wanted to play with this was to check out KDE 3.3 .. and I have seen it, and I can't say I am impressed or blown over, it has a few nice features, but nothing really outstanding.

- CD install is bareminimum ... gets kernel and gui up (and office), most of hte other stuff is missing.
- It didn't detect my display card, so I am going to fix that .. I might actually chuck it and go back to debian .
which also had problems but finally worked fine.
- I like this better than Mepis (which is partly based on this). Mepis is too primitive.
- Kpacakge manger is too dumb .. synaptic (with debian) is much better but you have to get all those things.

I still need to use windows .. I haven't found a good alternate for ms-office . the open-office and it's derivatives
are about 5 years behind msft in features ( I mean basic features) .. so I tried using code-weavers .. they are even more screwed up than anyone else. codeweavers still doesn't support outlook worth crap .. and simple things like quick books etc. so I really can't get rid of windows (yet).

Oh one thing about Knoppix ..

It's VERY german, if you go their website most pages are in german and I can read every language of this planet so it's not a problem, but I am really waiting for the french version to arrive there :-(( .. what a bummer.

so my suggestion is F*******K it

Thanks for the info on language and difficulties. I'll watch for them.

Is my hard drive sufficient to use Knoppix? I leave the CD drive at home since it's on the docking station and that saves LOTS of weight. I need an OS I don't need to keep in my CD drive for the whole time.

If you want to play with this, it's not a bad idea, you will have to do a few things to make this work right for you.
1 .. you will have to create a partiion on the disk to have "some" data that goes across boot sessions.


I think you can safely run with a 6G disk , it's not a lot, but it's enough if you don't want to keep loading junk into the machine .. and
there is plenty of it lot out there.

-

Try both, then decide for yourself which you like better. It's the only way -- J.W.