Installfest has been /.'d

[zcerza at coe.neu.edu (Zack Cerza)]

On Thu February 12 2004 21:20, Bill Horne wrote:
> We've had some discussions about deciding on a "standard" distro for
> installfests, but I don't think we decided on one.
*coughDebian* . . . sorry I'm a fanboy.

> I also feel we should have a "standard" evaluation procedure for each
> incoming PC, with a form used to "triage" the boxen and make
> recommendations to the other volunteers. At a minimum, I vote we examing
> spare disk space, processor speed, the pressence (or, hopefully, absence)

How about processor _type_? Do RH and SuSe even work on, say, PPC or SPARC? 
Having a "standard" distro might be impeded by lack of support for certain 
architectures. Okay, so nobody's likely to bring a Sun box in, but I'd be 
surprised if, among the throngs, nobody ever brought a Mac in. Not that OSX 
doesn't rock, but nobody's putting that on an oldworld Mac.

In my experience, Debian is a bit tricky to install, unfortunately, though the 
new installer is much better. But as far as x86 boxen go, I've had great 
experiences with MEPIS (http://mepis.org). I don't mention Knoppix because, 
while useful, it has been known to cause major problems when dist-upgrading 
due to some knoppix-specific packages that have akward dependencies. MEPIS, 
afaik, doesn't have any such problems, and I tend to stay relatively bleeding 
edge. I'm tracking KDE CVS HEAD right now and it's been smooth, for the most 
part. Anyway, I'm certainly partial to Debian because of its always-free 
attitude and package management. MEPIS also has a few of its own system 
utilities (like frontends for /etc/network/interfaces and lilo) that are very 
useful and don't break any other packages.

But then again, I'm a noob to BLU so I probably shouldn't be telling everyone 
what distro they have to use.

Zack