[wplug] Highly Recommended Distro

[Brian Roberts]

Hi All,

Hopefully some with find this useful.  I've been using FreeBSD on 
servers for a few years now and have dabbled in Linux on the desktop for 
some time picking up various distributions.  I've store bought numerous 
copies of RedHat, Suse, Corel, even Caldera and Ive downloaded @ 15 
Different distros that made it on and off of systems for various 
reasons...slack, peanut, gentoo, knoppix, gnoppix, Storm (now thats was 
a good distro)

Anyway in my Search  I really wanted to learn Debian as it seems to be 
the "de facto" Linux distro and looks like thats what user Linux will be 
based off of. Off the bat, I love the FreeBSD Ports system so I figure 
Gentoo would be good,   but for a desktop and nuking rebuilding systems, 
compiling from source is just too time consuming, and for old boxes its 
pretty much useless.    FreeBSD as a workstation has always served me 
great but i don't like the idea of using packages for the large binaries 
and using ports from source to manage smaller tools,  portupgrade helped 
a ton, but it still wasn't clean enough for me as a desktop.  

I tried installing Debian, not bad, lots to learn, but definitely not 
something I would trust my windows using friends with.   They would drop 
it at the sight of the install,  But apt-get was way to powerful to give 
up on.    I did not want to pay for a libranet/lindows or some other 
debian based newbie distro,  so the search continued...

Enter Mepis. 
http://www.mepis.org

Developed by a guy in WV,  its a bootable cdrom (think knoppix) that you 
can run purely off of the cdrom and keep all personal files on a memory 
key....so you can take your distro with you anywhere you go.   Nice,  
good idea, but even better, unlike knoppix where the install is a 
mess,   there is a handy Mepis Install Tool right on the desktop that 
will have the disto on your system in a matter of minutes.   Very easy 
to use, and has some good repair utilities in case you need to repair 
the install later on.   All in all I think it is an great idea that is 
pulled off very well.   I have been using it on both my work and home 
primary desktops for about a month now and don't see myself switching 
off anytime soon.   I think that is a record for how long a distro has 
stayed on and used on a system in a long time.   Now those newly 
purchased SuSe 9.0 discs are collecting dust.  

Just some random thoughts,   hope someone finds them useful.

Brian