Re: distro for novices
RRPotratz wrote:
Mepis www.mepis.org . "Just Works" on 2 different laptops I've
tried. USB external drives, thumbdrives, ethernet, modem ( lucent
winmodem ), sound, video, even wireless nic! Nice choice of
applications for a 1 cdrom distro. Easy install from the live cd.
I heartily second the recommendation for Mepis. That is what I'm using
on my primary system, since when I started on the Path of the Penguin
over a year ago, Woody was giving me lots of problems with my
motherboard (Asus A78NX Deluxe), particularly the on-board NICs. I was
pleased to discover that Mepis supported this board from the get-go
(actually, I was initially running Knoppix, then after making the
mistake of trying out Linspire, which overwrote my mbr, from which I
could not seem to recover, I started fresh with Mepis.
For really low-spec systems, I also recommend Damn Small Linux. I've
had that running nicely on an old TI laptop (486/DX2-75, 12MB RAM, 540MB
hard drive, dual boot with DOS 6.22/Windows for Workgroups 3.11).
The really great thing about Knoppix and its descendants is its
portability due to the great hardware detection. In most cases, you can
install one of these on one system, then transfer the drive to another
system fairly seamlessly. That was how I got Damn Small working on my
laptop, since DSL didn't recognize my parallel port CD-ROM drive initially.
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