After using Mandrake for a number of years, wifi was invented. No matter how I tried, Mandrake would never find my wireless card. In fact, I tried it again with version 10 and it still did not find my orinoco card.
Switching to liveCD PCLinuxOS, based on Mandrake, my laptop worked right off the CD. Mandrake lost me. A lot of geek tweaking with Mandrake never made the wireless work. I got tired of trying.
Standard Debian does not find wireless cards very well either, but Knoppix and its derivatives like Kanotix and xfld find everything nicely. Some knoppix-derived distros, such as the morpix-based CDs, don't seem find everything all the time, but they exceed the standard Debian install, which requires multiple disks.
Knoppix is the innovator here with its cloop autoconfiguring complete-linux-distro-on-one-cd technology, but it gives you everything with loosely-organized menu that overwhelms the first-time user. And I switched to xfld because it dumps KDE for a less resource-intense xfce desktop with a simpler menu structure that has fonts I can read. I'd like to see the knoppix technology incorporated into debian.
RPM is an inadequate updating mechanism when compared to apt-get. With RPM you are always looking for another dependency to download, but apt-get finds the dependencies and installs everything needed to make the program you wanted work.
The Synaptic Package Manager is a pretty good GUI interface to apt-get, but I still find the command line easier and faster to use.
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Damn Small Linux uses qemu to load DSL on a running windows xp machine, but you still can't write to NTFS!
Switching to liveCD PCLinuxOS, based on Mandrake, my laptop worked right off the CD. Mandrake lost me. A lot of geek tweaking with Mandrake never made the wireless work. I got tired of trying.
Standard Debian does not find wireless cards very well either, but Knoppix and its derivatives like Kanotix and xfld find everything nicely. Some knoppix-derived distros, such as the morpix-based CDs, don't seem find everything all the time, but they exceed the standard Debian install, which requires multiple disks.
Knoppix is the innovator here with its cloop autoconfiguring complete-linux-distro-on-one-cd technology, but it gives you everything with loosely-organized menu that overwhelms the first-time user. And I switched to xfld because it dumps KDE for a less resource-intense xfce desktop with a simpler menu structure that has fonts I can read. I'd like to see the knoppix technology incorporated into debian.
RPM is an inadequate updating mechanism when compared to apt-get. With RPM you are always looking for another dependency to download, but apt-get finds the dependencies and installs everything needed to make the program you wanted work.
The Synaptic Package Manager is a pretty good GUI interface to apt-get, but I still find the command line easier and faster to use.
Maybe they could rename synaptic to update...