[olug] Good article zero- and small-footprint Linux distributions

[William E. Kempf]

Kevin Lanik said:
> I started with Mandrake 7.something and the install was no harder than
> any windows install. Now on 9.1 the install is a dream, so I'm not sure
> where he's coming from there. The only time I had the amount of
> difficulty he described was in my OS class when I was attempting to
> install a mach4 system... I do, however, agree that Knoppix, Morphix and
> the SuSE live eval projects represent a good step forward for folks who
> want to test the waters before devoting a partition to Linux.

There's some validity in what he says.  I had a machine on which Windows
installed easily, but Mandrake (9.0 and later 9.1) would appear to
install, but when booted X would produce nothing but a black screen. 
(Note that the installation program displayed the test screen just fine!) 
The problem was 3D acceleration drivers that plain didn't work with my
hardware, and had to be manually removed from the X config.  This sort of
thing *does* happen a little more frequently with Linux, because hardware
vendors don't always supply drivers, while the MS marketing muscle means
most hardware vendors supply drivers for Windows.

That said, however, this argument is still a little tenuous at best. 
There are driver issues on both platforms, as pointed out.

-- 
William E. Kempf