In the past 24 hours I have:
- Installed Ubuntu Liux
- Installed Gentoo Linux
- Installed Debian Sarge
One installation of each distribution upon a Dell Dimension L800R, with 128Mb of memory and a 20Gb drive.
The order above is the order I did the installs - I knew I wanted to end up with Debian "proper", but thought it was worth exploring the alternatives to see where we are let down.
Gentoo .. I didn't like, although I can see that it's a seductive system. The flexability really is present, and the machine did a suprisingly good job of installing software from source. (I admit I didn't do a full system rebuild, nor did I get as far as starting the X11 Window system).
Ubuntu was very pretty, although the system was sluggish with Gnome installed I can't fault the distribution for that.
After all the past controvosy I was disappointed to find a lack of semi-naked people on my desktop when the installation had finished - guess I'm just a pervert ;)
(OT: Correlation between BDSM + Geek? Seems high, perhaps I really am just a pervert :)
Sarge's daily netinstaller worked well on the machine, the configuring gave me a working system in a minimal amount of time. I think that the Ubuntu installation was marginally ahead - because the install CD-ROM I burnt only had two options on tasksel "Mail server" and .. something else.
Once I'd fixed up the sources.list file I had more tasks and all was well.
Oh, almost forgot. I wrote a small introduction to running mod-security on Debian, including installation notes for Woody.