Before I start I would like to state I am a devout anti-Microsoft user and this pains me. My main machine is a Mac of which I am very pleased with. In all the years I have owned a Mac they never let me down, they just work and very well.
My venture into Linux has come to a halt. My ThinkPad 380ED has been stripped of Damn Small Linux and replaced with Windows 98 Second Edition. There was no speed increase over Windows and the age of the machine limited me to the distro's I could use.
With Damn Small Linux being the best option, I was annoyed by the limited amount of software and support for it. I know Microsoft are switching off support for 98 & ME in July but the wealth of knowledge and software and supported hardware under these operating systems was a drawing point for me.
My wife also wants to use the laptop and Linux is no place for someone with little computing knowledge.
So apologies as I seem to bail out on Linux. When I eventually purchase a new Mac I intend to dual boot with Ubuntu or something similar as I will have a better choice of full blown distros rather than cut down one aimed at low end machines.
Kind Regards
Simon Royal
---- www.simonroyal.co.uk The box said requires Windows 2000 or better, so I bought an Apple Mac
Simon Royal wrote:
Before I start I would like to state I am a devout anti-Microsoft user and this pains me. My main machine is a Mac of which I am very pleased with. In all the years I have owned a Mac they never let me down, they just work and very well.
My venture into Linux has come to a halt. My ThinkPad 380ED has been stripped of Damn Small Linux and replaced with Windows 98 Second Edition. There was no speed increase over Windows and the age of the machine limited me to the distro's I could use.
With Damn Small Linux being the best option, I was annoyed by the limited amount of software and support for it. I know Microsoft are switching off support for 98 & ME in July but the wealth of knowledge and software and supported hardware under these operating systems was a drawing point for me.
My wife also wants to use the laptop and Linux is no place for someone with little computing knowledge.
So apologies as I seem to bail out on Linux. When I eventually purchase a new Mac I intend to dual boot with Ubuntu or something similar as I will have a better choice of full blown distros rather than cut down one
Did you try Zenwalk as earlier suggested? Linux isn't that hard form an X user's perspective...
Cheers, Laurie.
On Tue, 2006-05-09 at 09:20 +0100, Simon Royal wrote:
With Damn Small Linux being the best option, I was annoyed by the limited amount of software and support for it. I know Microsoft are switching off support for 98 & ME in July but the wealth of knowledge and software and supported hardware under these operating systems was a drawing point for me.
Ermm, I'm fairly confident that Windows 98 support ended a while ago. I may be wrong tho.
It's a shame you've given up on Linux, it really is a lot of fun. Maybe again in the future... who knows? :)
Best wishes, Richard.
On Tuesday 09 May 2006 09:20, Simon Royal wrote:
Before I start I would like to state I am a devout anti-Microsoft user and this pains me. My main machine is a Mac of which I am very pleased with. In all the years I have owned a Mac they never let me down, they just work and very well.
My venture into Linux has come to a halt. My ThinkPad 380ED has been stripped of Damn Small Linux and replaced with Windows 98 Second Edition. There was no speed increase over Windows and the age of the machine limited me to the distro's I could use.
With Damn Small Linux being the best option, I was annoyed by the limited amount of software and support for it. I know Microsoft are switching off support for 98 & ME in July but the wealth of knowledge and software and supported hardware under these operating systems was a drawing point for me.
Sad that this was your experience.
I think you'll have a worse time on windows 98 myself (for which support was withdrawn years ago), which will reliably crash itself without *any* third-party apps installed, but time will tell.
My wife also wants to use the laptop and Linux is no place for someone with little computing knowledge.
Well, I know several true end-users who use linux exclusively as a "computing for granny" platform, so that doesn't seem right to me.
Still, have fun, and let us know when you see the terrible folly of your chosen path :P
Ten
On Tue, 2006-05-09 at 09:20 +0100, Simon Royal wrote:
Before I start I would like to state I am a devout anti-Microsoft user and this pains me. My main machine is a Mac of which I am very pleased with. In all the years I have owned a Mac they never let me down, they just work and very well.
Erm, try telling that to the Client I was dealing with today...However I suggest you do it from a distance. Mac's break just as well (although not always as easily) as any other computer system, and in fact can be slightly more troublesome when they are broken.
(spoken by someone who had to travel to London today to fix a broken Netinfo database on an OSX box, and before any OSX geeks ask, no the nightly backup copy was shafted as well and I couldn't just resume from a clean one as there were too many user accounts to deal with)
So apologies as I seem to bail out on Linux. When I eventually purchase a new Mac I intend to dual boot with Ubuntu or something similar as I will have a better choice of full blown distros rather than cut down one aimed at low end machines.
No need to apologise. The only thing I can offer at this point is that some time in the future you should try Linux on more modern hardware, It is true that lightweight distros run quite well on older hardware but they tend to have a slightly steeper learning curve and often don't have quite the same user base as a "full fat" distro.
I hope you have a better experience next time Simon.
Kind regards Wayne
On Tue, May 09, 2006 at 11:37:35PM +0100, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
So apologies as I seem to bail out on Linux. When I eventually purchase a new Mac I intend to dual boot with Ubuntu or something similar as I will have a better choice of full blown distros rather than cut down one aimed at low end machines.
No need to apologise. The only thing I can offer at this point is that some time in the future you should try Linux on more modern hardware, It is true that lightweight distros run quite well on older hardware but they tend to have a slightly steeper learning curve and often don't have quite the same user base as a "full fat" distro.
That's a very true comment really. When you thin things down they aren't as user friendly, just compare Windows 9x to any of the NT/2000/XP series and you find a whole new world of pain :)
Thanks Adam
On Tuesday 09 May 2006 09:20, Simon Royal wrote:
So apologies as I seem to bail out on Linux.....
I can appreciate your remarks and although the machine couldn't run a modern distro and GUI particular fast I always had great success running SuSE 7.3 Pro with KDE on a similar specced Thinkpad and very usuable it was too (check out Ebay, a copy sometimes pops up).
Still warm regards to you and hope to see you back real soon just as soon as you re-experience the pains that sent me scuttling over to the linux camp in the first place.
May the Penguin be with you....
Martin
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Adam Bower -
Laurie Brown -
Martin Collins -
Richard Brooklyn -
Simon Royal -
Ten -
Wayne Stallwood