August 26, 2004
Distro woes
5 weeks I waited for these distributions to be delivered, and what do I get? One distro crippled by lack of software, and another crippled by lack of a GUI!
Debian (woody). Crude (but functional) installer, old kernels, but I thought at least I"d have something familiar to work with straight away, even if it was a little outdated. I had all the questions answered, all the software installed, and ready to land with my feet firmly in the K desktop, when I was greeted by the dreaded "3-flickers" (I had the same problem with my laptop until I got Ben Herrenschmidt"s ibook kernel. Ben, you"re a legend). I thought maybe the radeon drivers were too old for my brand-spanking-new (I guess?) radeon 9800SE (agpgart wouldn"t install either...), so I added a testing apt source and got the highest 2.4 kernel available (2.4.27). But I think that made it worse.
SuSE (9.1 personal), on the other hand, has an entirely graphical installer where more or less everything is autodetected. And a 2.6 kernel. I was exploring KDE and YaST in 20 minutes, tops. This is how things should work, I thought, despite all the puke-green splash screens in place of the usual, sleek, scrolling white text on a black background during the boot process. That is, until I decided I"d quite like to use Mozilla Thunderbird as my email-client, and discovered that it wasn"t included, nor was there any way to download a binary package. apt-rpm seemed like a fine solution, but while there was a binary rpm available for that, one of its dependencies needed to be compiled from source. No problem. Except that SuSE9.1 Personal doesn"t include gcc...
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