June Meeting
Our June meeting was the quiet occasion that I thought it would be.
Ten of us turned up for a chat about Linux whilst we sat around a machine into which we installed Debian. This was Debian 2.2 Potato release cycle 1. As the Debian people have explained to most of us, this is not to be trusted but it is to be tested. We found that most of the Debian system worked fine. The confusing part of it was the way it loaded Enlightenment without anyone telling it that we wanted it. Then it made it's mind up that we wanted Icewm shortly afterwards. Test cycle 2 is already upon us and there are many stories of much improvement. Looks like it's best to wait ? For more info see the front page at http://www.debian.org
We finished off the meeting with a general discussion about Red Hat, SuSE and Debian and some of the other distributions. It was noticed that it took three people four hours to install a simple Debian x-windows system. Although, I will have to admit that none of us are Debian experts. I did have the other Debian based Storm Linux and Linux by Libranet CDs on the table next to me. These commercial distributions take Debian and make it easy to install and understand. Of course, Corel Linux is based on Debian and is much better now than the day that the first beta was released. Corel Linux 1.1 is very nice and easy to install. The UKUUG produced a CD of Corel Linux which was version 1.0. That was very good as well.
As we all know, Debian is based on the deb package. This is different from the Red Hat and SuSE distributions which are based on rpms.
Debian is a superb distro. You just have
to understand cryptic clues in the way that the people at GCHQ do.
That's all :-) We are all looking forward to the final release of
Debian 2.2 Potato.
People who identified themselves at our meeting.......
Dr Jan White (Sheffield University) Richard Ibbotson (me) Craig Andrews José Luis Gómez Dans Graham Hunter
Andrew Downing Timothy Baldwin Simon Brown ........... and some others ??