Re: Hesitating to take the plunge in Debian
After reading this wonderful thread, I have a few comments of my own to add...
> but aside from the stability issues I think its not very impressive
> when an OS needs to crutch on another OS just to boot! so eventually
> get OF booting going ;-)
eek. I still have nightmares about going into OF to set up the boot parameters
properly back when I was using LinuxPPC. I'm running on a PMac 5400/180, which
has broken firmware when it comes to the external SCSI chain...things didn't
work right. I praised god when BootX came out, because I didn't have to muck
around in OF again...
For those that have never actually entered OF and entered commands by hand,
it's a scary scary place...the entire environment is very "forth"-ish...I
believe that's what it was originally written in, wasn't it? Whatever...makes
no nevermind.
> so do I, I wish there were more apps for GNUstep, and I am not sure
> of some of the few GNOME apps which are interesting can be made to
> look NeXTish without using the GNOME/E! bloat center (I prefer
> windowmaker for a windowmanager) unfortunately i doubt any theme
> will fix the menubars in the window, vertical menus are so much
> nicer....
While it may not have the next look, I prefer to use BlackBox. I think it's
even smaller than WM, and it has that "different" look and feel to it, if
you're trying to escape from the Mac/Win look. Of course, as with everything
under X, make sure you can fake the 2nd and 3rd mouse buttons, or else life
gets rather difficult. :) By default, Debian has this built in I believe. I
don't even use X anymore, and do 80% of my work through telnet, and any X-ing
I do is done over a network through another X server. The machine sits
"headless" in a back corner of a storage room, cuz that's all I need.
> >I wish I'd knew all of this a month ago, when I installed Linuxppc and
> >started to slowly try to fix and optimize everything... Ciao and thanks
> >again,
>
> its amazing how linuxppc has a seemingly good reputation, but yet I
> cannot understand the bugs in that distro, I don't wish to really put
> them down for there work but they really need to do more testing and
> wait longer before releasing, even redhat who has a tendency to leave
> bugs in for release does not leave such a high number of frankly
> stupid problems...
Oh god, do I know that feeling. LinuxPPC left a very bad taste in my mouth. My
first experience with Linux was Debian on an x86 machine. LinuxPPC was all
that was available at the time for the mac, so I went with it, and man was I
annoyed. I was one happy little camper once I found out that Debian/PPC was
being developed finally. It's still isn't up to snuff on a few issues (mostly
install ones), but it's getting better all the time.
Oh well.
-Jeremiah Merkl
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