Re: debian

[Paul Johnson <baloo@ursine.ca>]

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On Sat, Jun 21, 2003 at 11:08:22AM -0400, Bijan Soleymani wrote:
> My mother needs to access her email. I installled Debian on the
> computer. She has no problems using Debian. However, I had to do the
> install because she has no clue about settings in XFree86. With knoppix
> she just has to press the power button and she gets logged into KDE.

Yes, but see, this still holds true that the difficulty of the
installer doesn't matter.  Debian trades off one bitch of
an installer for the ability to run on very little maintenance (which, if
you script it, you could have her box send you an email every time it
dialed up, or serve the dialup for her yourself, and do it yourself
for her every once in a while) for extremely long periods of time, and
extremely customizable to your mom's needs and what hardware you've
got to do it with.

Knoppix, on the other hand, trades off a lot of usability and pretty
much the entire need for a packaging system but lets you cram the same
OS on almost any semi-recent (like at least a Pentium) hardware with
the reasonable expectation that most, if not everything, gets
autodetected correctly.

> I got X to work. It wasn't so tough (I can even run the gimp). You just
> have to remember to mount your mouse :)

Umm, you can only mount block devices...character devices like mice
can't be mounted...

> the command is something like
> settrans /dev/mouse IMPS/2 /dev/psaux
> and you tell X to use /dev/mouse and osmouse.

OK, that's telling X about your mouse, not mounting it.

- -- 
 .''`.     Baloo Ursidae <baloo@ursine.ca>
: :'  :    proud Debian admin and user
`. `'`
  `-  Debian - when you have better things to do than fix a system
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