[wplug] Tried several distro's

[R.E.Coutch]

Hi all,

I've been testing several distro's this week.

Red Hat 9
Mandrake 9.1
Debian 3.0r1
SuSE 8.1

As someone else mentioned,
Red Hat 9 has improved fonts when web browsing thanks to an updated X 
and anti-aliasing in Mozilla.
I swear it runs fasted than RH8 did on the same machine.
The install went flawlessly.
They still only have part of the cryptoAPI stuff installed and no ALSA ( 
if this matters to you).

Mandrake also installed flawlessly and like Red Hat, had up to date 
software and a 2.4.21 kernel.
It still uses linuxconf and sndconfig like old Red Hat.  It only offered 
ext2 and ext3 on install, however.

The Debian was an interesting experience.
As someone (on the list) mentioned, it doesn't use a GUI for 
installation but it is menu and question/answer based.
It reminds me of old Borland TurboC for DOS programs with its drop 
shadowed text based "windows".
The Debian really likes to chit-chat during install by throwing out 
little factoids about the software it is installing.
This could get really annoying after an install or two. There's probably 
a way to do a silent install.
The strange thing was that I had to manually configure my XF86Config-4 
file because the one the system generated didn't work.
What really surprised me is that it installed X version 4.1.0 (over a 
year old) and KDE 2.1.1.
A lot of my favorite kernel modules could not be found even though I 
searched through the kernel module menus in the install program.

Did I do something wrong? I though Debian came with KDE 3.1 and Xfree86 4.3.

I'll mess with it some more tomorrow. Anybody have any suggestions?


Thanks,

Bob


BTW - I don't want to become annoying with my little editorials. If you 
think I'm overdoing things a bit ( I am one of the rookies on this 
user's group),
               drop me a note and I turn it down a bit.
               Otherwise you're going to hear all about SuSE 8.2 after I 
get a chance to try it out.