A rather large change took place here over the last day or two: For the first time in a couple of years, no machine in the house is running Crux.
It’s true. I’ve backed up the year-old system on this Pentium and begun transferring everything to Debian.
Why? Partly for a change of pace, but partly because I fell flat four or five times in a row getting Crux 2.7 installed.
A half-dozen non-booting kernels, two or three applications with missing libraries, and I’m a bit weary of trying to keep up with configuration changes.
Of course, the hardware only makes things more complicated. Each attempt needs a swap of the CF card, and each failure requires a swap back.
At this point I’m willing to experiment with something that doesn’t require as much maintenance. Debian is always satisfying, and even if it is a little slower, it should take less effort … and time.
So … where to next? 😉
Motho ke motho ka botho 
Out of curiosity, why didn’t you fall back to Arch?
Arch is only i686 (unless you want to deal with the mess of outdated i586 ports), my guess is that the machines that are falling back predate this instruction set. Most of KMandla’s machines are i586 🙂
My question is “Why not connochaetOS?”
yeah, I second that, connochaetOS is great and the closest thing we have to an arch i586 port (alive).
…because is beta, maybe?
I don’t know, for me, its stable enough.
It’s stable enough for me too. I just wanted to spread around a little bit. 🙂
Right: Not Arch because of the i686 problem. 🙄
Not ConnochaetOS just because I haven’t spent much time with Debian lately. And although it does sound smarmy, I do like to spend a little time with everything. It’s healthy.
hehe sounds more like free love 😉
its ok, we archers forgive you
😛 jk
So … where to next?
Linux From Scratch? Gentoo?
Not sure. Debian for a little bit, and then we’ll see what happens next. 😉
Squeeze or Lenny?
Lenny at first, with an update to Squeeze as a possibility. Last time I used Squeeze on machines this old I had boot problems. And the time it takes to make the update can be very frustrating, if it just ends in problems. 😉
The Update to Squeeze killed my Debian install, that was the beta version though, might be ok now, I’ll find out at some point no doubt 🙂
I know I’m a bit off topic, but I’d like an advise. A friend of mine is trying to setup an old Pentium II for his little daughter to start knowing internet. So a basic distro with a graphic environment with a browser and a mail is far enough.
Any recommendations here?
I’m a bit hardcore and suggested him debian lenny cli only…he got a bit angry about that but I told him this way his daughter at age of 15 (she’s 6 now) is going to be a great hacker :-))
thanks a lot,
your blog is very inspirational to me
Gemon
Gemon, is it so bad to be a hacker @15?
I heard there were Puppy remixes for kids. Maybe they can fit.
darduck, you mean puppylinux.org? I’ll give it a try
…as for the hacker @15, that’s what I’d hope for MY son 🙂
maybe my friend is not like me though
thanks
Gemon
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