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Subject: Re: Linux Versions: what's the best for us?

Author: Steve Coladonato

Date: 10:10:36 12/19/00

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On December 19, 2000 at 11:42:46, Fernando Villegas wrote:

>Some post has been written about different versions of Linux, and although Bob
>did coment about one or two of them, each day seems to appear a new package. So
>my question is: which of all them is, today, best in the following terms?
>
>a) win compatibility without risk of destroying nothing.
>
>b) best loaded with features: word procesors, internet browsers, etc.
>
>c) best fitted to run available chess program written for linux
>
>
>Fernando

I have recently installed Red Hat 6.1 on a machine that was running NT4.
However, I completely reformated the disk so there is nothing left of the
windows environment.  The install was pretty straight forward and the
distribution included Star Office 5.1 which is compatible with the Microsoft
Office tools.  I created documents in SO 5.1 and saved them as Word documents,
wrote them out to a floppy and opened them up in Win95/98.  I also did the same
with a PowerPoint presentation and an Excell worksheet.  Worked fine.  The
Internet browser is Netscape and that too works fine.  My ISP is Compuserve
which uses a script to make the connection.  I downloaded a couple of help files
from there and my "dial-up" connections worked just fine.  I also downloaded the
mtools RPM and installed it.  That package provides for reading and writing a
dos formatted floppy drive and iomega JAZ drive.  Of course you can mount these
devices as Linux formatted drives also.

The Red Hat distribution comes with GnuChess and Xboard and runs out of the box.
 I downloaded Crafty from Bob's site, compiled it ( a few hints from Bob) and
that interfaces just fine with Xboard.

I am now experimenting with wine (Windows Emulator) and will see what that can
do.  There's a bunch of configuration I need to do but I think it's because I
have no Windows installed anywhere.

All in all, I'm pretty pleased with it.  I understand that Red Hat used a
non-production release of gcc in the Red Hat 7.0 distribution and that it caused
problems.  But I think there are fixes for that available.

I'm not familiar with the other Linux variants but I have seen Mandrake for $25
in a Wal-Mart of all places.

Go for it.

Steve



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