From: rrusk@ssd.csd.harris.com (Bob Rusk) Subject: Re: TAMU: has anyone tried it? Date: 2 Feb 1993 14:54:46 GMT
In article <98JXB6PW@cc.swarthmore.edu>, rbrown1@cc.swarthmore.edu (Randolph Gregory Brown) writes:
>I am about to get a new machine on which to put linux. I was
>wondering if anyone (independent of the organizer) had tried out the
>TAMU distribution as compared to the SLS.
I just it this morning after a couple of false starts. It only needs
17 1.44M diskettes, which is nice for the budget. It installs quickly
(33 minutes on my 386/20) and looks pretty complete, though I haven't
had much time to play with it yet. The new X setup is really great.
It found 5 usable modes for my ATI VGAWonder 512K connected to an old
Thomson UltraScan (similar to an original NEC MultiScan).
On the down side, the instructions are rather incomplete and sometimes
wrong. They don't mention that you can't use lilo to boot from a
logical partition, the instructions for manually mounting your newly-
created file system are wrong, and the instructions for setting up
/etc/fstab are wrong/incomplete. Also, the program used for reading
from the floppy drive is very unforgiving. It doesn't check that
the correct floppy is inserted in the drive, and it doesn't flush
the keyboard buffer after you hit enter. If you insert a disk out
of order, or if you accidentally hit Enter twice, you get to start
all over again with the installation.
>Is it better than the
>latter?
Better is relative. Thus far, I like it. However, I don't think an
unaided beginner would. I've been using linux for 8-9 months now,
and it still took me a few tries to get everything right.
TAMU claims to be based on the SLS distribution with a few additions/
enhancements, uses fewer diskettes, and installs faster. I suspect
that SLS would be easier for a beginner, though.
>Is it a serious problem that it is not upgraded to gcc 2.3.x?
Someone else will need to comment on this one, I never got around to
upgrading it myself.
> -Randy