Jonathan Hutchins wrote:

> 
> 
> Since release 7 or so, when they went into bankruptcy, they've been falling 
> way behind.  I gather that if you pay to join the "club", you get access to 
> much more current packages.

I paid for mandrake, but there just wasn't the polish that I'm seeing 
with debian - and this is with the "testing" version of debian. Not sure 
how much of it is due to using the libranet flavor. Debian has some nice 
tools, but it seemed to be too far out on the bleeding edge.

  I've been testing distributions one at a time. I bought the libranet 
installer for debian - and it went with out a hitch.

So far I'm really liking what I see.  Libranet earned their money by 
added a few time saving tools. So far I like it better than Redhat. An 
example helps - I needed to install e3 (a tiny text editor I've grown 
used to) and all I did to make this happen was to open the 
Admin-libranet - click on add package from internet - it asks for the 
package name - and it is finished.

I've also noticed that for some reason debian includes exim, slypheed 
and other gpl packages that I would have to go get with 
redhat/mandrake/Suse.

The biggest reason I like Debian is that it seems to be the heart of the 
linux community - my hunch is that most gpl developers are using debian 
  and reading between the lines the other distributions get their 
updates from debian anyway.

The installation defaults to the ice desktop, which I hadn't played with 
before. It gives you the choice of using the kde or gnome file browser 
(and others) - I will probably settle on kde.

I've also noticed that things run a bit faster than they did with my 
suse and mandrake tests - not sure why?

-- 
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Karl Schmidt EMail    Karl@xtronics.com
Transtronics, Inc.    WEB http://xtronics.com
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Lawrence, KS 66049    FAX(785) 841-0434

If you shake a politician's hand, be sure count your fingers.
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