Re: Suggestions for a Linux distro that might work

On 2012-09-16 10:53 AM, Bill Strosberg wrote:

> If I were you, I'd remove the SSD drive from the equation, install
> and see what you get.

My wife was prepared to return the computer if it wasn't suitable, so we didn't 
want to break the seal.

 > Choose the distribution that YOU
 > are most comfortable and capable of maintaining.
 > ...
 > I have some boxes out there doing "appliance" jobs that have been in service for
 > many years without touching them - some running Sarge and Woody still.

The objective here was to get a plain vanilla computer, and run a plain vanilla 
Linux, so that my wife could use Firefox, Thunderbird and vi. She would never 
'mess with' anything, so it would be similar to your 'appliance' scenario and 
should never need 'touching'. I would not be allowed to 'maintain' it, since 
future failure would be blamed on me. It was to remain "not broke" so that I 
didn't ever need to "fix it".


>
> I hate hardware changes - they are the most expensive time there is as not only
> can you spend hours dealing with making a reluctant gizmo work, you lose the
> real paying work you could have got done in the same time. Chasing some %.0005
> performance increase that no one will ever notice when it costs $2,500 in time
> to get it behaving makes me scream. Don't be anyone else's quality control /
> research & department for free.

I don't know why Gigabyte had to put yet another different ethernet 'card' on 
their motherboard. I might write them a stinky letter about it. Ethernet should 
be such a basic function now, why did they have to change anything?

> Production boxes should be kept at least one or two distribution releases behind
> leading edge, and the packages you choose should be as well. Using latest
> releases and testing code is a recipe for disaster in my opinion. There is a
> reason why LTS versions are released - it is so you can make a choice that can
> do a job for a long time without lots of tweaking and maintenance.

Thank you for the long answer, Bill. In the end, it seemed that only Ubuntu 12 
had the driver for the atl1c ethernet 'card', but that distribution had the 
property that it worked initially, but after downloading and installing 398 
updates, it wouldn't reboot. Ubuntu 10, Debian 6.0.4 and CentOS 6.2 all failed 
to get networking running. Debian was the most informative install: it gave us a 
list of ethernet drivers for us to choose from, atl1c was not on the list.

Since having me 'fix' the problem was exactly the situation my wife didn't want, 
the computer was to go back - on the reasonable basis that a "no OS" package 
that didn't run any available flavour of Linux was pretty pointless. However, 
the store in Kanata Centrum wouldn't touch it, they refused point blank. They 
said that they supported Windows and nothing else. I see this as a major 
stumbling block to the acceptance of Linux. I was pretty angry, really. My wife 
says we're never buying anything from them again. (We did tell them that we 
wanted a "no OS" computer because we wanted to run Ubuntu; the salesman even 
responded "good choice".)

Finally, my wife agreed to let me "fix" the problem, which I did in the simplest 
way I knew. I bought a $9.99 network card, broke the seal and installed it. 
Ubuntu 10.04.4 LTS is now running fine.

Thank you for telling me about LTS releases. I don't like 'version chasing', 
sometimes you don't want the latest, you want something that 'just works'. 
Ubuntu 12 seemed to be cluttered with "ubuntu one", chat tools and a horrible 
GUI that didn't have a task bar, wouldn't start a new instance of a program 
unless you chose a menu option, and had no way to drag and drop to a window 
behind, so she'll be happier with 10 anyway.

--
Andy


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