Re: Most "HAM" friendly distro ?

[Ian Haver <g6vey@btinternet.com>]

Hi all.
If i can just add my two pennies worth on the distro wars.
I originally run RedHat 4.0 many years back with just a console and jnos.
If was fast and fab. Then I wanted to write a letter, errm wheres the 
equivillent of
M$ Word. there isnt one. It also become more apparent that this linux i 
had found in mid 90`s
was quite a tool. Anyway to cut a long story short i dont go for a ham 
distro because most
distro`s run ham apps with very little mods/tweeking. Instead i went for 
the more glossy
workstation/desktop type and then have the fun and excitement of getting 
the ham bits to work
on it.
Theres enough of us so called experienced linux operators out there to 
guide the newbies
now, so theres not really a massive problem anymore. Lets face it its 
not hard to install any of the
recent distributions now. Maybe getting a few hardware issues can be a 
heart ache but by
enlarge linux goes onto pc hardware pretty well these days.

In my experience, listening to a few newbies in my BBS area they are 
trying to install SUSE10 or
Mandrakes latest on a Pentium I clocked at 166Mhz wich had been running 
dos/win95.
It isnt going to work properly. I try to explain that they wouldnt run 
XP on it so it will struggle with
the later kernels and resources needed to make the system run smoothly 
in linux. The sooner these
linux vendors stop selling Linux spec as in 386/486 upwards the better. 
It should really be X86
architechture with min 1G proccessor and at least 256M Ram for those who 
require good desktop
applications.
Forthose who just want a console with no GUI then thats a different matter.
Although i was caught out there as well. One of my ham friends wanted a 
basic console mode ax25
interface between his lan machines and his packet. What better, run 
linux with all the ax25 bits and then with
his windoze based lan machines he can access the outside world. He did 
this on a P I 166 with 32M RAM.
It worked very well for him until one day he rung me and told me it had 
all gone very slow, when i got there
i found out he had worked out how to install packages and had installed 
the entire KDE suite. He also
managed to change the run level to 5. so hey he had a GUI as well but it 
was really slow and as a result his
retry rates had doubled in his packet setup.

So with all the woffle above i can only recommend from experience. Run a 
good fast machine with plenty of
Ram. Pick a Distibution which fruits with apps, you dont need to install 
them, but at least you can later.
Run Linux for at least a week if not two and learn how the linux 
operates especially its file structure and
permissions. Then have a play with ham radio. Because hopefully by then, 
you would have learned how to edit
and manipulate files. You would have learned how to delete or rename 
files and more so how to restart parts
of linux without rebooting the whole machine. I find in the ham world 
with Linux, give them a few days to
learn or they will soon be going back to windows with a grumpy face 
slagging off Linux at every convenience.

Best Regards All

Ian
G6VEY
SYSOP GB7YFS
Author Xarpm_plus
http://radiolinux.co.uk