On Friday,  7 April 2000 at 19:18:30 +0200, Thomas Michael Wanka wrote:
> On 7 Apr 2000, at 7:41, Greg Lehey wrote:
>
>> The consensus I
>> have from my Linux friends is that Debian is the closest.
>
> At least it is said to be the only one exclusively based on open
> source components, on the other hand it is also treated as one of
> the most complicated to install.

Last July I installed every kind of UNIX I could get on my laptop,
just for the fun of it.  Here's my list of ease of installation, from
easiest to most difficult:

  FreeBSD
  NetBSD
  Debian Linux
  ... (nothing for a while)
  RedHat Linux
  BSD/OS
  UnixWare
  OpenBSD

OpenBSD lost because it wanted to install on the whole disk (I had two
other operating systems there), and I didn't want to risk it.  

BSD/OS lost because it didn't find my PCMCIA boards.  BSDI admits that
laptop support is very weak.

UnixWare lost because it wouldn't run *at all* after installation: the
boot failed with some catastrophic error such as no kernel found.  It
also renumbered my slices, confusing the installed FreeBSD, which no
longer found its partitions.

RedHat lost because its silly installation program couldn't find the
Ethernet card.  This isn't an PCMCIA problem: I was able to configure
it just fine with ifconfig, but the GUI wanted to find an entry
somewhere for the card ID, and it didn't know it.

Debian was, in fact, quite simple, modulo the fact that I didn't
understand some of the concepts (such as that Linux, like a hermit
crab, can put file systems in Microsoft extended partitions).  It also
kept stopping and asking silly questions.

FreeBSD came ahead of NetBSD because I've performed the operations
more often.

Greg
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