On Thursday 06 October 2005 11:15 am Siri Amrit Kaur wrote:
> I started with Mandrake 8.0. Tried a lot of different distros
> because I wanted to learn. It wasn't until my second try of
> Slackware that I really started learning much.
I sort of misspoke. I tried a lot of distros because no one distro
would work completely. The fonts rendered badly in those days, or the
modem or soundcard wouldn't be detected, or the printer... I couldn't
figure out how to fix those problems if I couldn't fix it through the
"user-friendly GUI". So I decided to try Debian or Slackware to
really learn Linux.
After 8 tries, I couldn't get Debian to install.
My first try with Slack was a disaster, but after months struggling
with it, feeling like a stupid failure, I went back to Mandrake and
found myself bypassing the GUI and editing files in /etc to fix
things. Mandrake still didn't work for everything, so I went back to
Slack and loved it.
I finally left Slack and settled on Kanotix. It installs to Debian
Sid. This was because the last version of Slack I tried did awfully
on my computer. I also wanted easier package management than Slack's.
I tried a bunch of live-cd distros that could be installed if I liked
them. SimplyMepis was great, but could never detect my very ordinary
soundcard. PCLOS was beautiful, but there was something that I
couldn't get to work. Ubuntu wouldn't let me set up a dialup modem.
Finally found Kanotix, and it was the only distro I've ever used that
configured absolutely everything correctly without any work on my
part. The only configuration I had to change was putting a little
script into the Xsession file to get it to delete the session after
logging out. And that was only a problem because my default runlevel
is 3 using "startx" from the terminal, not runlevel 5 from a GUI.
I want to try Frugalware when I have the time because it's based on
Slackware but has the great Pac-man package utility from Arch. It
also comes with Gnome, which Slackware dropped. I don't use Gnome,
but I like the Gnome games :-)
Siri Amrit
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