[Etherboot-developers] hmmm, what is that damn clicking noise? :-)

[Marty C. <md...@th...>]

I had a head crash on my main development machine (a laptop), but 
fortunately I back up the important stuff (my home directory,  mainly :-) 
to another machine.

So, I had the perfect opportunity to try out the shiny new Progeny Debian 
that I just got (http://www.progeny.com/).

It is good.  

The installer was fast, lean, and efficient.  The messages during 
installation were helpful, and it used intelligent defaults for stuff.  
It installed Sawfish as the default window manager, and it runs nicely on 
my 333MHZ PII based machine.

I'm used to Red Hat, so I was a little hesitant to switch on my 
development machine, since for most of what I do (writing drivers, using 
CMU Common Lisp) it doesn't matter much what dist is on the machine.  But 
after Red Hat announced the 7.1 release to come out 1 day after Progeny 
Linux (April 24th), I figured that even Red Hat thought it might be good, 
and so that was a good cue to get Debian on my machine now :-)

I guess the thing I like most about Debian so far (besides apt-get) is 
that it is just very clean and tight.  That's not really very precise.  
It's more like driving a well-made car.  It's not one thing, but a lot of 
little things that let you know that it is made well.  I've been hacking 
or using computers most of my life now, and what it "feels" like is there 
are a lot of people like me who sweat details working on Debian, so a lot 
of little things that often don't usually work quite right simply *work* 
in Debian.

Anyway, I know this is kind of off-topic :-)  But I thought there might 
be other people like me who have thought about trying Debian, but found 
the installation process and documentation to be awful (especially for 
laptops) in the past, before the Progeny distribution, so might not be 
ready to try it again. I just wanted to say, "I tried it, I liked it".

Alright, back to hacking!!

Marty

---
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   Name: Marty Connor
US Mail: Entity Cyber, Inc.; P.O. Box 391827; Cambridge, MA 02139; USA
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