NYCPHP Meetup

[John Lacey]

Brian Preston-Campbell wrote:

> Mandrake 9.2
> 
> On Wednesday 04 February 2004 09:36 am, bpang at bpang.com wrote:
> 
>>>Speaking of which, how many of you use linux as your primary desktop?
>>
>>I do. And I have even taught myself to use The Gimp!! It could still help
>>me to learn how to script-fu it, but otherwise, it works fine for me.
>>
>>TRYING to rebuild a new desktop using something other than RedHat now.
>>
>>Which other distro has a nice point-and-click, make-the-hard-decisions for
>>you install GUI like RedHat?
>>I tried Debian and couldn't get it to bring up X.
>>Tring Gentoo now, but it's taking forever, and I'm starting to get
>>confused and will probably have to do it a second time to correct my
>>mistakes from the first pass.
>>
>>Opinions? Advice?
>>
>>thanks
>>
>

I've dabbled in RH since 4, and have used 7.x extensively.  I've 
worked with 8 and 9 and have recently loaded Fedora, but Linux has 
never been my primary desktop except when I run it on top of VMWare -- 
which is nice for developing/testing.  I also use SNAGIT to capture 
installation screenshots when loading Linux on XP via VMware.

I use my Wacom Intuos tablet with the GIMP and am now writing all my 
Open Source courseware using OOo -- works great.  And Mozilla 1.6 
rawks.  It's my email client too.  Firebird and Thurderbird are also nice.

Mandrake setup looks pretty friendly, but I've never actually used it 
once I got it installed.  I have had several distros on VMware and 
it's a great tool to show people all the common flavors with little 
more than a mouseclick.


Knoppix is too cool for words, and I've actually used it to recover a 
win98 product ID for a friend who bought a used computer.  If pressed, 
I think I could teach an entire LAMP course using Knoppix.  They're 
supposed to be coming out with ver. 3.4 in a coupla weeks that I 
believe will have kernel 2.6 and other goodies.

btw, I'm on a dialup and downloading an ISO is out of the question, so 
I buy all my stuff from:

http://www.edmunds-enterprises.com/linux/index.php

"real cheap" :)

John