[Foresight-distro] Re: The md5sum for Foresight Linux Disc 1 and 2

[Paul Scott-Wilson]

On Fri, Jan 19, 2007 at 08:04:58AM +0200, Heikki Pesonen wrote:
| I like Suse but Ubuntu has a larger Finnish speaking forum. I hope I
| could soon leave the systems managers tasks for my sons computer to
| Joonas 12 years and he do not have English well enough recently (he is
| too lazy in  the school as was I what you soon will notice).
| 
| I will also work together with all the family members to find and to
| help them find the desktop design most suitable. Although it's told
| that you can configure every Linux as far as you like, in real life
| that's only talk.

As English is my first and only language I often forget about the importance of
software localisation.

Obviously the configurability depends on a number of factors. Foremost the
user. Some people want a working desktop and thats it. They don't want to
get involved with how things work. But knowing how things fit together and
work is what opens up more configuration options. Being aware of the concept
of a Window Manager means you can select between Gnomes, KDEs or something
else entirely. This divide is one reason for there being so many flavors
of "Linux". I say that in quotes because its not really the kernel that is
changing, its the software layered on top. The first group of users might
select between Ubuntu, Kubuntu or Xubuntu depending on whether they preferred
Gnome, KDE or Xfce. The other alternative is to do it yourself with something
like Debian or Gentoo. Gentoo being the other extreme; It gives you the maximum
configurability but at the steepest learning curve. A lot of this power is
because of Portage; Gentoos package management.

To me Foresight is an interesting mix. It combines a great desktop which
anyone can use with a powerful package manager called Conary. The number of
packages available is small but growing and most packages are trivial to
create. The configurability of a system comes from the package manager and
Conary is my favorite. 


On Fri, Jan 19, 2007 at 08:04:58AM +0200, Heikki Pesonen wrote:
| The test:
| Running from the /-directory
| find . | grep Suse_menu.lst   - Suse_menu.lst (a copy of
| /grub/menu.lst) is on an other partition than / being vfat-format.
| That was the same for all. And all of the different Linuxes were on
| the same computer of course.
| 
| SLED10   Suse 10.2    Kubuntu 6.10
|  6"-7"          4"-5"                14"
| 
| Most people reacted according to "that kind of test does not mean
| anything", but they did not suggest any better. The computer I have
| given to my son is made of scrab parts except the processor is Celeron
| 2,4 and the 512 memory is DDR. So the Linux must be able to deal with
| quickly.

That is a rather strange microbenchmark which isn't really showing much
about performance. It depends on to many things like how many files are in
the filesystem, the filesystem types and how long the system has been on.
For example if you run it twice the second time it'll complete in a matter
of seconds. IMHO the only real measure of a desktop system is to use it.
If you perceive it to be running faster thats all that matters. New users
often comment in #foresight how fast it feels compared to whatever they were
using. That could mean anything but I happen to agree, Foresight _feels_
fast. Comparing how fast you can crawl the filesystem isn't going to tell you
anything about that. You'd probably get better "performance" with
    $ find / -name Suse_menu.lst

On Fri, Jan 19, 2007 at 08:04:58AM +0200, Heikki Pesonen wrote:
| I suppose the DVD-version of Foresight contains more stuff than the
| two CD's so I will try Bittorrent later to download it and then
| install Foresight to my computer.
The install from the DVD is identical to that of the CDs. The reason both are
available for those that can't use the DVD. Extra software is available after
install through our package manger Conary which can also be used to remove
software you don't want.

--
Paul.