[Ham-Computers] Linux?

[Paul]

fkamp at comcast.net wrote:
> Is this the list that had a discussion on why more
> hams dont use Linux?
> 
> I recall seeing such a discussion somewhere about
> a week or so ago.
> 
> One person suggested investigating Puppy Linux.  I
> did.  At first it did not work.  Got some sort of
> interrupt handling error.  So I tried it on
> another computer.  This time it worked.
> 
> I have been playing with linux distros for years. 
> Tried Red Hat 5.2, 6.1, 9.0; Mandrake 6.0,
> 8.1,8.2; Suse, Slackware, even FreeBSD (which is
> not Linux).  They all had varying degrees of
> installation difficulty and resulted in systems
> that were too slow (older computers), with too few
> windows compatible applications, and of
> questionable worth.  So I always reverted back to
> some version of MS Windows.

I started with RH 5, and the difference in all the distributions since 
those days (not that long ago) is almost unbelievable.

Now, I don't see a great deal of difference between the distributions - 
I prefer mandrake because its software management (urpmi) is (I believe) 
  better than Debians (flame wars stuff I know).

It took me 2 hours to install mandrake 10.1 on a friends computer with 
everything running (we'd formatted the harddrive to get rid of over 230 
nasties), and then over 2 days to install XP, find/install the 
printer/scanner/etc drivers, the anti-virus, spyware, firewall, 
&re-install office software, etc.

The apps for radio are improving all the time (you've probably already 
found http://radio.linux.org.au/ )

I've made a few copies of 'Knoppix for hams' CDs and handed them out to 
local club members, who have been amazed by what they've got on one disk.

And no, I won't be going out to by a new 3 GHz computer, with 512 Mb 
memory and a dedicated DirectX 9 video card so I can run Ms Vista.

Paul
5B8BA/G7SPV