[Tfug] Ubuntu 7-04, firefox

[Jude Nelson]

PCLinuxOS and Elive are pretty good Grandma Millie distros...PCLinuxOS
because it looks kinda like WinXP, but has all the power of Mandriva (which
used to be the easiest distro around before Ubuntu came along and Mandriva's
creator jumped ship to Ulteo), and Elive because it is EXTREMELY polished
(uses a UI unlike any I've ever seen; it claims to use a modified svn build
of Enlightenment), and it's INCREDIBLE) and based on Debian.  I'll have to
bring a livecd of Elive to the next meeting; it's well worth seeing.

On 8/18/07, Jim March <1.jim.march at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> In defense of Ubuntu:
>
> As many here know, I'm running a single-core Celeron 1.6 laptop -
> basically an Acer as cheap as they come.  I've now got 1.5gigs RAM in
> it - had two but am sharing with a friend with a similar rig.  I've
> got Intel945 graphics.
>
> I did some experiments in pushing this combo with Ubuntu 7.04 to the
> absolute max.  Got Compiz Fusion 5.3 running, zero problems, good
> performance.  Then got VirtualBox running a 512meg VM with WinXP,
> complete with everything needed to take apart Diebold databases
> (pirate copy of the Diebold central tabulator code plus MS-Office
> 2003).  Used the "not totally free" variant of VirtualBox from the
> binaries on their site, so I have things like USB passthrough and
> "networking" such that the VM can read /home as Z:.
>
> Performance with all this running is exceptional.  I can run XP full
> screen, demo various stuff there and mention "oh by the way, this is
> all really running on Linux" and the instant they do "huh?" roll the
> cube around to Gnome :D.
>
> Now.  I don't deny Ubuntu has issues.  Just try removing OpenOffice
> and watch it puke all over it's shoes.  But, by late in Edgy's upgrade
> cycle and now into Feisty, stability is exceptional.  And I've yet to
> see an auto-update in a release version do anything brain dead...can't
> say the same for Fedora Core 6, as much as I liked it.
>
> If I need more performance, Xubuntu is available.
>
> If somebody has a better idea for a "Grandma Millie" distro (one that
> can be supported among non-geek users) I'd like to hear about it.
>
> Yes, I could get something like Arch or something else tuned for speed
> working - for me.  And I did briefly just to prove to myself I
> could...but it became obvious it wasn't going to fly in a pure user
> environment.  Ditto everything else I've tried, with FC6 coming the
> closest.  Even then, incoming auto-updates sometimes broke stuff
> (happened twice in two months) which to me took it out of the running.
>
> Jim
>
> _______________________________________________
> Tucson Free Unix Group - tfug at tfug.org
> Subscription Options:
> http://www.tfug.org/mailman/listinfo/tfug_tfug.org
>