After a few iterations, I’ve yet again reached what I consider to be my happy spot. If you perhaps ever saw a Linux laptop or desktop I ran, you perhaps remember me running this Window Manager. I started doing a SuSE 10 DVD install on two systems I own; one Dell Inspiron 4100 laptop and a Pentium 4 3.0ghz Prescott with a 128mb nvidia card in it. The fascination with SuSE ended after about two days. I perhaps have a failure when it comes to bundled admin/management tools. I just cannot tolerate YAST, YAST2, or YAST anything. Even console mode YAST irritates me. So I found a package called you4s which is nice and does console updates, email, etc.
But what I reached was questions. I have a job that I can run Linux on easily every day. Not like before at all. Before I needed certain tools which precluded Linux (Project, Visio, etc). My laptop does not have enough “umph” to do all of it on VMware. But SuSE, Fedora Core, Redhat Enterprise Linux, they all suck at something or another. What it leaves me with is the thing I always end up with. I end up with good ole classic Debian Sid. Debian, I’ve blogged before about being an excellent server OS and I use it that way. Basically I can get a Debian install doing backups, rsync, samba, nfs, apache; in little or no real time. With Fedora I always futz with things. Do I need X? No!! How do I do that? Is it some custom mumbo jumbo? A text based custom install a friend tells me. But still I get this group of packages that I always say — WTF? Why?
So I spent 1.5 days getting a Debian install down that makes it as my work desktop and laptop. Now I don’t do a YAST blah, blech, geez to get a package. I do an apt-get install blah blech geez. One step. I still wrangle with Debian and perhaps I make it or break it from what the purists see. But you know what? It works for me! Its a simple desktop with a right-click menu and the wonderul CLIP up top left. That wonderful CLIP and the functional WindowMaker desktop!!
Fast processors, lotsa memory, good disk drives. Kernel compiles and adding things. Soon I have the menu and ingrediants down! Then I wrangle with mplayer and the mozilla plugin so I can watch those movie clips on Yahoo!
I made this promise to the Debian Gods! I will not travel too far from my home any longer. I may go through the land of Gentoo on occasion and may have to ssh to the foreign kingdom of SuSE and I may have to put on another hat (oh forget that one… geez); but I’ll always return here.
