> Your observations, please.
Last time I used Debian, it was Debian 1.3.1, so you might not want my
observations on Debian, as they might be... obsolete. (ISTR, X11 was
something that had to be obtained separately at that time.) If you're
looking for a distribution with excellent hardware detection, I could
make a recommendation there from my personal experience, but if you're
a Debian fan you're probably *ed to apt-get, which this distro
does not have. (It seems the easiest way to upgrade this distro is to
get a fresh set of CDs from Cheapbytes. Not that that's especially
hard (it's way easier than upgrading certain commercial OSes), but
it's not apt-get either. I'm thinking about moving away from this
distro for that reason, despite its excellent hardware detection,
about which I can't say enough good things. But at this point I'm not
upgrading (except select packages) until the gcc3 transition is nicely
settled down, which I figure will be about 3-6 months now that a
couple of major distros are shipping 3.2.)
--- Rabbit trail back to topic briefly...
Speaking of upgrading specific packages... I have Gimp 1.2.2. How
worthwhile would it be for me to upgrade? How involved would that be,
assuming I don't want to give up all the plugins and filters and stuff?
--- End rabbit trail
As far as package selection, I've found that regardless of
distribution it's a lot easier to just install _everything_ and not
worry about it. Because, regardless of distribution, you will
otherwise come back later to install some nifty thing you found out
about (Bugzilla, some movie player, it doesn't matter what it is) and
discover that it requires... stuff you never thought you'd ever need,
which in turn requires other stuff you never thought you'd need. It's
not worth the gigabyte and a half you save, when all it means is you
have to install it all later anyway.
This applies especially to devel packages. They're misnamed. Rather
than foo-devel, they should be foo-essential or foo-important. They
don't have anything obvious to do with development; by all
appearances, they exist for the purpose of supporting other seemingly
unrelated packages, and you need every single one of them in order to
have a working system. For example, perl-devel, contrary to its name,
doesn't have anything to do with developing Perl; you just need it to
get CPAN working so you can install modules that are required in order
to install other things. Since this is a Gimp group, I'll use that as
an example... you might very plausibly need CPAN (and therefore
perl-devel) in order to install a filter or plugin or something for
Gimp. Would a graphics artist think he'd need the development package
for Perl? Right. You just need all the devel packages; why they're
named with devel in the name is beyond me; they don't have squat to do
with development, at least not in terms of package selection; whether
you do any development or not, you just have to have them all.
Quote:> I'm a cartoonist, I really like GIMP.
I'm *ed to Gimp, but there are some other nice features of Gnome
too. I like the Gnome applets better than the KDE ones, for example,
and the drawer paradigm (on the panel) works very well for me. Also,
gnome-terminal is the best xterm I've found yet. You'll still want
KDE installed, though, as certain of its apps are preferable. (Here
I'm especially thinking of the kcalc and komba. I also prefer the KDE
file manager over Nautilus.)
Quote:> I've got a slow net connection so I'd have to buy the installation
> CD-ROMs. <http://www.veryComputer.com/; The cost is fairly trivial.
I generally just go to cheapbytes. You could also use wget, which is
basically magic. I once used it to retrieve 3 ISO CD-ROM images (a
total of around 2GB) over my unreliable 33.6 dialup. As long as you
don't pay by the hour for your dialup connection, the time doesn't
really matter that much; it only comes to a week and a half or so,
which really isn't that long, unless you're impatient.
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