OT: What to use on a PIII in Bulgaria?

[Richmond Mathewson]

Having, largely, got over that bout of flu I have just come upstairs from
the school, where I have been popping the Pentium IIIs back in place and
doing personalised GDM login screens, I am happy to say, that despite my
misgivings Ubuntu 8.04 seems no slower than 5.10; the only bother
is having to reset all the properties on the RR standalones so they work as
self-executables rather than looking for something external.

The people at Ubuntu have always been extremely helpful (rather similar
to this RR Use-List); which I haven't found elsewhere. Although I have yet
to find an Ubuntu user who writes their own Primary-Ed programs; all seem
to go for the 'one-size-fits-all' of edubuntu (which seems to contain
programs largely aimed at keeping kids occupied rather than educating
them as such).

The only slightly funny thing I have had is with a COMPAQ where, with
8.04.2 all the sound comes out of the built-in speakers rather than 
getting routed
through the headphone outlet; and I cannot reroute it for the life of me.

Certainly, quite apart from my silly little school, as far as I can see 
there seem to
be no real conflicts between Ubuntu and RR, and RR standalones.

Re Slax: having come to Linux 'late in life' and only really because of 
3 problems:

1. Bulgaria is one of the pirate software capitals of the world - 99% of 
everything
     running on pirated XP.

2. I don't really like Windows and feel that the problems it seems to 
cause are
     more trouble than its worth: don't want any downtime in my school - 
and with
     Ubuntu I have never, never had any.

3. Want an OS where I can customise the GUI to serve my needs, rather 
than put
     up with somebody's idea of a 'one-size-fits-all' GUI.

rather than any great urge to be a "Linux Mage", I rapidly gravitated 
towards
Debian-based distros as, frankly, the easiest to work with (at least from my
point of view).

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
tedious middle-aged anecdote follows:

last night I watched "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid" on Turner Classic 
Movies:
it struck me as a strangely Zen-style film - probably the last poisons 
of the
flu virus doing horrible things to my mind - and at one point James Coburn
(who, oddly enough, was very good at playing James Coburn, but not much
good at playing anybody else) said "I have got to the age where I want 
to stop
worrying about tomorrow" - not that I would want the Mark Shuttleworth to
think he's my saviour.  :)  However, I would recommend watching
"Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid" if you are feeling particularly nihilistic.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Peter Alcibiades wrote:
> Slax is really worth a look on older equipment.  Slackware based, and the
> Slack based distros are always faster.  No fat - 200MB.  Media players.  A
> bit manual to install on hard drive, but it can be done - the default is
> liveCD.  Very customizable.  And KDE is at least as close to Windows as
> Gnome, most think closer.  It will run entirely in memory if you want, so
> its pretty fast.  The fastest distro with a mainstream desktop that you'll
> find.  Good hardware detection.  Been around quite a while.  I checked the
> latest Puppy a couple weeks ago and that's OK, but disapointing by
> comparison.
>
> Its basically a pure KDE based Slackware distro. KOffice, Konqueror, Kmail. 
> And a few supplementary media bits and bobs.  It would run Rev fine.  There
> are smaller faster ones, but nothing which has a better balance between
> speed, function, and familiarity.
>
> Peter
>