Re: Gnome toolbar

From: David L. Johnson (david.johnson_at_ptd.net)
Date: 10/21/05 

Date: Fri, 21 Oct 2005 12:13:06 -0400

On Fri, 21 Oct 2005 01:47:42 -0400, Allan Adler wrote:

> I don't understand this. I think you are assuming that debian is already
> installed, and then these commands cause it to update itself.

That's right, but compare that to the effort you have to go through (and
expense) to upgrade your RH.

> Here are
> a few questions:
> (1) Which Debian do you think should be installed on an old clunker
> running
> at 133 MHz and other small resources, but which does manage to
> support RH 7.1?

It's not which distribution, but how much of it, and which environments,
you install. I would recommend the "testing" distribution (which has a
name, but keep it as testing and updates will be better). "Stable" in
debian is too old and has security problems akin to your RH. "Unstable"
is too bleeding edge.

But, on a slow machine, watch what you install. Gnome will slow the
machine down. Go for a simple window manager, like fvwm or even twm.

It is not easy to configure debian the first time. There are nearly
endless decisions to make (use dselect and choose the packages you need),
and each decision will force you to resolve conflicts/add packages to
support what you really want. But, that is the flip side of choice.
You've been using linux for some time, I think, so you know pretty much
what you need/want. On your machine you can use X, but be concientious
about not running too many resource hogs at once.

If you need a word processor and a spread***, use abiword and gnumeric,
not open office. Use firefox rather than other flavors of netscape. rxvt
is a lighter-weight terminal emulator. The more things you rely on the
command line for, the better (no file managers, no graphical ftp). You
can still use TeX (you might look at lyx as well), and if you have one, a
mathematical computation program such as Maple.

> (2) How would I get it, since downloading
it is probably out of the
> question
> on a dialup connection like mine?

Two options. You can download a minimal system onto a cd or a bunch of
floppies, install that, then use dselect to fetch from a remote site
(explained in the documentation) the packages you need. Yes, this will
take a long time.

The other option will be to either download and burn cds at another
machine, or buy a package of cds. These are available for cheap from
various places.

> (3) How long would the update take on a 56K dialup connection? You said
> maybe
> an hour, but that might make some assumptions about the connection.

Yeah, I was assuming some sort of high-speed connection. I did this on
dialup some years ago before I got a cable modem. Often the downloading
would take hours -- but it is automatic and you can let it run overnight.

>> Certainly there will be a few headaches involved in adapting to a new
>> system, but it might well be worth it. I do consider claims that "just
>> about every package you have installed" are suspect to be nonsense, but
>> you certainly would not want to run a telnet or ftp service from that
>> distribution.
>
> What about Netscape?

When I talk about services, that refers to opening your machine up to
outside connections. Frankly, with dialup and a dynamic IP, you are less
vulnerable than those on broadband, but also remote services aren't going
to be useful to you, so just don't run any. Running netscape is OK.

The one time I got hacked was when I presumed I could leave ftp service
running on my office machine, on a t1 line. Now, I no longer have
anything other than ssh available, and that only accepts connections from
trusted machines (my department, my home).

>> look at it, and I like it a lot. I even switched from my ancient mwm
>> to gnome.
>> Thanks.
>
> I'm glad you like it. I've never been very fond of it.

Well, it probably would not run very well on your machine. 

-- 
David L. Johnson
   __o   | I believe that the motion picture is destined to revolutionize
 _`\(,_  | our educational system and that in a few years it will supplant 
(_)/ (_) | largely, if not entirely, the use of textbooks  -- Thomas
           Edison, 1922
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