Recently switched a heavy-load production server from RedHat to Debian and well I like to outline that the boot up is 30% faster than the RedHat bootup was.

Also the packages installed were almost just right ... except for openssl, etc which had to be installed and ipchains which was still installed although I've chosen bf24 and installed Kernel 2.4.18 ... anyways, Debian rules :-)

Actually I like Mandrake pretty well; especially since I learned how to compile the kernel and can remove a lot of the extra bloat. With kernel 2.4.19-24 SuperMount is fixed and it screams through the /mnt directory now.

I am playing with Vector Linux, and Peanut Linux on my P120/32M and it is going a lot better...Debian was the pits.

I'll try Debian again on my 900Mhz Athlon in a virtual machine, and see how it goes.

Vector and Peanut are based on Slackware, I liked them so much that I switched over to Slackware proper to get a "complete" distribution. Then I like Slackware so much that I haven't switched to anything else yet (although I've been attempting to learn Debian, as I've previously noted).

PS: I wouldn't attempt to use KDE on the P120, do either Peanut's Enlighenment or Vector's IceWM (or what ever else they have now: Xfce?) instead.

Curious why your knoppix experience wasn't a good one. Which Knoppix CD did you burn from?

My recommendation is to:

(a) Get the latest Knoppix CD.
(b) Get the latest knx-install (i.e. not the one on the above CD)
(c) Boot to Knoppix and run the new knx-install (from floppy, FAT partition, etc)

apt-get update

and away you go.

I had a fully fledged up to date Debian ready to rock in 15 minutes. That was after hours spent trudging through dselect etc.

One thing to bear in mind is that all the great hardware detection stuff gets missed in the HD install, _all_ you get is a Debian install. You can retro fit some of the cool Knoppix hardware detection stuff.

Go to http://www.knoppix.net , register yourself a username and then visit the HDD Install Forum on the site. Lots of helpful people willing to resolve any problems you might have.

Links to latest Knoppix CD and latest knx-install are on the front page of http://www.knoppix.net

Flibble

BTW, eadz (the sysadmin of http://www.knoppix.net) has remastered Knoppix with KDE 3.1

You get a full distro that boots from CD with all the latest eye candy. Nice. ;>

Flibble

Yea, I think Knoppix is pretty cool too, a preconfigured Debian live CD that you can then clone to a disk. The compressed file system makes it quite fast for something running completely from a CD. (Virtual Linux which is Mandrake based, is the same basic idea and is pretty good too)

Yes, I agree this is the #1 weakness of Slackware. This is why I am trying to learn Debian so that I can generate highly customized Linux installations and have everything work. With Slack you mostly need to install the whole distribution and live with what you get (which I feel is usually pretty good), otherwise prepare to fight dependency wars. The funny thing is that several times now I've fought those wars and won in less time than I spent trying to figure out a messed up RPM based distribution that refused to install something be cause it wrongfully thought it was already installed. I guess I just need to use "RPM -i --force" more often.

Yea, Slackware is non-standard about this, but simple about it too. They've reduced the amount of config files to a minimum, then emulate SysV somewhat just to get by. It wouldn't break my heart if they decided to comply with the Linux Standards Base (even with RPM!).

At the expense of being very confusing to others, this is one of the great things about the Linux OS world. With MicroSoft (not the toilet paper company), you don't have any choice with Windows, (other than old Windows), you just have to live with it. With Linux, if there is something you don't like: try a different distribution.

why not use urpmi then? u can use it on the commandline.
urpmi.update -a
urpmi package

that's it..
why updating with the gui ?

I didn't try urpmi, but I tried rpm, and was able to see some errors. Errors that I didn't know how to fix. I like updating with a GUI so I can see a list of what I need to update. A lot of times I would do a "rpm -i package" and not get any errors or any indication of anything, and the package was not installed.

Does that actually work any better? I figured it was the RPM database that was getting messed up and causing the problem. I've had problems like this with the command line RPM with RH and Mandrake. The "RPM --rebuilddb" seems to help.

I tried rebuilding too.. that did help to some degree. I think the root of the problem was that I was trying to install the latest packages without having the latest gcc. I may end up having just as many problems with debian when and if I try the same thing.