[conspire] NTFS Resizing

[Heather Stern]

On Mon, Feb 24, 2003 at 11:09:28AM -0800, Nick Jennings wrote:
> I've heard allot about Knoppix, and even recommend it to people who are
> interested in Linux but probably aren't ready to wipe out their system
> just to check it out. The installation script makes it easy if they
> ever decide to. 
> 
> I also hear it's Debian based (I am a long time Debian user myself), and
> I might want to seriously consider this for my home machine. Here at work
> though I spent allot of time deliberating over what I distro I should use.
> 
> The reason I chose Mandrake is because for me it's the best of both spectrums
> of the Linux world (the spectrum ranging from free and less support 
> commercial;y: Debian, Slackware etc. to requiring money to use: Lindows,
> Xandros, and to some extent Lycoris). 

Just to make clear, I don't mind if folk pick Mandrake, they seem to try
to keep a stable and coherent distro together, and actually spend some
effort on their beta tests. 

Debian's commerical support includes Libranet and (to a lesser degree) 
Progeny;  Debian's "non" commercial support, at least for laptop users,
is very highly regarded.  I occasionally see users of other distros pop
into the debian-laptops mailing list because it looks like the place
with the real answers in it.  

Personally I find Libranet's installer very pleasant; partition the
drive then let it do its thing.  One stop at "which kernel" after a
batch of stuff copies, and a friendly menu over tasksel after your 
fresh bootup.  Not all menus and "pick some apps" when people haven't
learned which apps are which yet.

> With Mandrake I know Wine and WineX will work good, Codeweavers etc. Commercial
> packages are usually packaged for Mandrake right behind Redhat. RPMs, though 
> I don't like them as much as DEBs, are what most companies package their
> products for, and at work I just don't want the hassle of getting things 
> working on a Debian system.

I'll note, for the record, that Klaus integrated Wine into Knoppix
sufficiently well that it runs straight from the CD and is willing to
run mswin applications from the msWin machine you're presently running
on. 

Note that for some windows apps, they may not run if they aren't on
writable media, and they may try to be a little exuberant about
memeorizing their new drive conditions.

For the generic case, alien works but the tricky part when moving
packages among distros are the pre- and post-install scripts, and
whether they affect the part of the system that memorizes sysadmin
settings - since many distros have chosen different storage mechanisms
for minor details like your network address, paper size, or preferred
language...

> I have the option of paying for commercial products, without having to pay
> for the Distro itself (like I would have to with Lindows or Xandros, and
> Lycoris if I want to install software packages for it via. Click-N-Run). 
> 
> I am very happy with Mandrake too, it "just works" and I don't have to
> fiddle with much in the way of system settings, GUI interfaces for the 
> stuff I do have to fiddle with are really nice, especially when I have
> the responsibility of "showing off" Linux to my Windows using peers. 
> 
> Debian just isn't as impressive to the untrained eye. :)

With Knoppix, one does not need to be the trained eye in any given
flavor of Linux to be impressed.  I used it as a baseline to show a bit
of Linux to someone who'd asked for a little tour;  I'd expected to take
them on a spin through the various distro websites, but she was
sufficiently distracted by poking into the internationalization
abilities and applications present on the disk that we chatted about it,
but really didn't get there.

It's not perfect.  She had some rather complicated Word docs, and
OpenOffice didn't do quite as well as AbiWord - and neither of them
handled her chinese and english intermix.  Kword handled odd character
sets as smoothly as the general K environment, but doesn't fully produce 
msWord format, and she's of course using the more complex features too.
But she certainly wasn't afraid of it and happily goofed off in its menu
full of apps and toys.  But recognizing herself as a power user already
in a given app, she was willing to see this as an environment she could
get to know.

So the lesson other distros need to learn from knoppix is: put an
installer on your liveCD eval disks :D


  . | .   Heather Stern                  |         star at starshine.org
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