Latest System Work – went with Edubuntu
Things have been somewhat steady lately but not overly busy. My latest endeavor was working on two systems, one was a simple ram, dvd burner and hard drive upgrade, the other is actually worth mentioning in more detail. It was an old 400mhz box with 64mb ram and 10 GB hd divided into a few partitions to accommodate Win98 and Linux. This was a box I had done a few years back and had Jamd Linux on it – for those who remember this spinoff distro. It was based on Red Hat 9 at the time if I recall correctly and had a kde desktop. Anyway, needless to say, it had to go so then came the debate of which distro to put on in its place. My favorite distro to use in general is Arch Linux, but in my opinion, Arch tends to be at its best when there is a decent internet connection available as it tends to do a lot of updates compared to some of the major distros which is a great quality, but because this computer has no network card, I decided to look at variations. Scarcely do I use anything but Arch but as this would be a box for a school specifically, I decided to ’shop around’. I thought of other distros like Frugalware but again I felt Frugal would be better served if there was a decent internet connection available. Also, I didn’t really want anything that involved me downloading numerous iso’s as there was no dvd reader in this box. I decided to try out Edubuntu. This got me interested because it was apparently designed for use in a school which is where this box was going. The result of the story is that I ended up getting it installed but it took a great deal of time installing due to the speed of the machine. Here are the major points I found:
Good:
* Nicely customized desktop
* Includes a lot of apps and games geared toward a school setting
* Includes the typical config tools to which people have grown accustomed from using debian / ubuntu based distros
* Uses the Gnome desktop
* Desktop speed quite usable once I disabled a bunch of services and upped memory to 192
Bad:
* Too many services enabled by default can slow down a system, I disabled about 6 that I found completely unnecessary even for admin types
* Preconfigured gui preferences for services and such are nice, but required me to su to root in term – opening them from a user level asked for a password which was rejected each time (yes, I created a root password prior to trying this)
* I never did end up getting sound working. The user was in the audio group by default which was good, but there was no alsaconf included to run (alsa-utils must not have been installed) and since I had no internet, I couldn’t try upgrading to see if that would fix it.
* I did actually try to get my usb-ethernet adapter to work but even though it showed under networking and I assigned an ip and confirmed the correct nameservers, I never was able to ping anything. It did load the correct module, but in the end I didn’t have all that much time to mess around with it so I left it as is.
Overall: I was reasonably impressed with the Desktop and Installation which was logical. Included apps were very specifically designed to usage which was expected. Not having any sound was fairly disappointing since it was a generic Soundblaster, although I have heard that these cards were a problem for Edubuntu. Maybe one day I will throw a network card into it and see if it resolves itself. I probably won’t touch this box for quite a while now so hopefully by the time I do, Edubuntu crew is still hard at work with development 
