[H-GEN] Choice of distro for server

[mick]

On Fri, 30 Mar 2012 10:53:15 +1000
"James C. McPherson" <james.c.mcpherson at gmail.com> wrote:

> [ Humbug *General* list - semi-serious discussions about Humbug and     ]
> [ Unix-related topics. Posts from non-subscribed addresses will vanish. ]
> 
> On 30/03/12 10:34 AM, Julian DeMarchi wrote:
> > On 03/30/2012 10:29 AM, mick wrote:
> >> My Debian experience dates to the 6 months before the release of sarge
> >>and 2 months after. The difference between a generic (support EVERYTHING
> >>in modules) i386 kernel and one for P4 with 2GB RAM with all required
> >>support built-in was very noticeable especially when I pushed it to the
> >>edge of reality.
> >
> > Wow sarge, thats like 4 years or more ago... You've had squeeze, lenny
> > and soon wheezy in between.
> >
> > I'd be curious for you to try it again and see how it rates in speed now...
> >
> > A 500MB word document, I can attest takes at least 10 - 15 mins to load
> > in Windows. I witnessed this when my mother created a document that big
> > and she asked me why it took so long to load.
> 
> All the more reason why one should use a document formatting
> system/language (LaTeX ftw) to write things that large rather
> than a word processor.
> 
> Of course, if you're running FrameMaker or something simmilar
> (does anybody still do this?) because you're actually in the
> business of page layout then that's different. OTOH, if you
> _were_ in the business of page layout, you would have invested
> in a machine with a sufficient hardware configuration to run
> the application which you depend on.
> 
>   
> James C. McPherson
> --

I have matured since then and now break those big files down into more manageable chunks. That doc was only mentioned as an example of the gains I could achieve with a carefully crafted kernel, there were also useful day to day gains.

When I first started with Linux, about 1996 redhat 5.2, I tried to make sense of latex but got no where, the way of doing things and the wording of the docs was incomprehensible to this OS/2 escapee.

mick