Re: [Pan-users] To explain why I'm unwilling to up date my glib/gtk+/etc libs ATM…

[Duncan]

Duncan posted on Tue, 05 Jul 2011 10:51:57 +0000 as excerpted:

> By the time you're done, you should have narrowed down your choice
> reasonably effectively and can then choose from only a small handful
> based on more specific factors.

I was going to add, but somehow in 600 lines I forgot... =:^P

Don't forget the LiveCD/DVD/LivePlug that most distros have available 
now.  That lets you test them out far easier without installing, tho 
especially the LiveCDs tend to work with high compression on the CD, 
expanding parts of themselves into RAM to run, so the oldest, lowest-RAM 
systems often can't run them when they can run an install to disk.  But 
certainly if you have a gig of RAM or more...

That way you know if a particular distro works on your hardware (tho if 
it doesn't, an experienced user can often make it work, particularly if 
another distro works), and can experiment a bit with the UI, etc, tho 
obviously you can't really measure the speed vs. a real install so well.

The live* setups are something generally unique to free OSs, because it's 
due to the flexibility the license allows.  The servantware folks tend to 
be rather stingier with the permissions required in practice for such 
things.  So it's a concept that's entirely new to a lot of people and one 
they might not fully grasp the benefits of, if it's not pointed out how 
that allows try-before-you-install flexibility.

Such live* images work real well for single-purpose distros, too.  
Firewalls, servers (obviously with somewhere to stick the served data for 
webservers, etc, but works well as-is for NTP, DNS, etc, perhaps boot the 
machine from the CD then serve of a USB attached drive for webservers, no 
permanent hard drive need be installed!), media-players, etc.  What can 
make this especially nice is read-only optical media means even if a 
machine is compromised, they can't write to disk so rebooting wipes, and 
burning a new CD (or using a rewritable in a CD-reader only) on another 
machine is pennies, for updates.  Of course these days such servers are 
often VMs, but the idea still works very well for firewalls. =:^)

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman