[H-GEN] linux iso's

[Tony Nugent]

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On Sat Mar 15 2003 at 10:29, Johann wrote:

> barry day wrote:

> >On Sat, Mar 15, 2003 at 07:20:39AM +1000, Dale Stewart wrote:

> >>Apart from downloading iso's from the web or buying the linux pocket book
> >>series where else in brisbane can I get linux iso cd's ?

> >The Sunday Computer Market is at the Acacia Ridge Hotel tomorrow.
> >There is usually a one armed guy at the market selling Linux distros.

> If that fails, I live at Sunnybank, and will be home sunday night. I
> have Redhat 8.0 , Mandrake 9.0 rc1 (I think, its whatever came with the
> linux format mag early this year), Debian 3.0 and Slackware 8.1, plus
> ELX (India version of redhat, which has an app launcher panel that I
> thought was pretty good), Knoppix (a very good debian version and rescue

As it turns out, I can supply the same things... also gentoo,
lycoris, smoothwall and some others that I've never had time to look
at.  (I wouldn't recommend gentoo, it is very ego-centric and
assumes unlimited bandwidth to download the apps you want/need from
its distribution site.  Same for lindows).  LinuxFormat mag is a
great source for many of these distros, highly recommended (esp the
dvd edition).  And yes, I've also got the pocketbooks which would be
trivial to copy.

  (Whatever you do get, I particularly recommend also getting your
  hands on a copy of knoppix, it is an excellent full-featured
  debian/kde distro that boots and runs from a cdrom.  Very, very
  useful for rescue work or for "normal" use, heh, it even has
  openoffice, wine, and a few good games on it.  It requires no
  installation, and it makes an excellent introduction to linux for
  those who have never seen it before).

However, I'm on the Gold Coast (not so close to Browns Plains).

> cd) and some others. I usually stick to Redhat, just because that is
> what I know, but I think rest have their advantages. I can burn you
> copies of any or all of these if you want, just supply the cds,

I've also stuck with redhat and for the same reasons (I know it very
well).  I've also stayed with rh7.3 (workstation and servers) since
I have found it to be a highly stable and reliable beast... imho
there were too many fundamental changes made to rh8.0 to class it as
ready for prime-time.  (Perhaps rh8.1 will be better, we'll soon
see).

What would be a BIG advantage if you do get a distro...

There have been many updates issued for all of these distros, many
(most) of them being vital security and bugfix updates.  (Recent
examples: file, openssl, sendmail, vnc, fileutils, pam, python,
openldap, kde, etc etc).

Redhat 8.0 for example, has had 450Mb of binary updates[1] issued for
it, and another 370Mb-odd SRPMs.

  [1] this includes all the kernels (~30Mb each) for each of the
  athlon/i386/i586/i686 architectures but you would only need one of
  them.

I'm not sure about SUSE, Mandrake, or Debian - but they have
certainly had the same packages updated for them too.

So if you can get a copy of the original distro release(s) as well
as a copy of the updates from some kind soul who has collected them
is willing to give them to you on one or two cdroms, then that would
be the way to go... it will save a lot of bandwidth attempting to
download these updates yourself.

I have all the rh7.3 updates here (~500Mb of binaries) if anyone
wants them.  (Along with a collection of some very useful stuff
downloaded from freshrpms.net, which is an *excellent* site for
obtaining a large number of extra utils for redhat-based boxes,
including all manner of multimedia apps).

> cheers
> 
> Johann

Have fun!

Cheers
Tony

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