Gnome toolbar 5216
On Fri, 21 Oct 2005 01:47:42 -0400, Allan Adler
That's right, but compare that to the effort you have to go through (and expense) to upgrade your RH.
It's not which distribution, but how much of it, and which environments, you install. I would recommend the "testing" distribution (which has a name, but keep it as testing and updates will be better). "Stable" in debian is too old and has security problems akin to your RH. "Unstable" is too bleeding edge.
But, on a slow machine, watch what you install. Gnome will slow the machine down. Go for a simple window manager, like fvwm or even twm.
It is not easy to configure debian the first time. There are nearly endless decisions to make (use dselect and choose the packages you need), and each decision will force you to resolve conflicts-add packages to support what you really want. But, that is the flip side of choice. You've been using linux for some time, I think, so you know pretty much what you need-want. On your machine you can use X, but be concientious about not running too many resource hogs at once.
If you need a word processor and a spreadsheet, use abiword and gnumeric, not open office. Use firefox rather than other flavors of netscape. rxvt is a lighter-weight terminal emulator. The more things you rely on the command line for, the better (no file managers, no graphical ftp). You can still use TeX (you might look at lyx as well), and if you have one, a mathematical computation program such as Maple.
it is probably out of the
Two options. You can download a minimal system onto a cd or a bunch of floppies, install that, then use dselect to fetch from a remote site (explained in the documentation) the packages you need. Yes, this will take a long time.
The other option will be to either download and burn cds at another machine, or buy a package of cds. These are available for cheap from various places.
Yeah, I was buttuming some sort of high-speed connection. I did this on dialup some years ago before I got a cable modem. Often the downloading would take hours -- but it is automatic and you can let it run overnight.
When I talk about services, that refers to opening your machine up to outside connections. Frankly, with dialup and a dynamic IP, you are less vulnerable than those on broadband, but also remote services aren't going to be useful to you, so just don't run any. Running netscape is OK.
Allan Adler I cannot imagine anyone, especially the manufacturer of a discontinued product, to compile and maintain such a list. You could get many of the needed updates by...
After the above experiments, I shut down the machine. Today when I rebooted, I had...
The one time I got hacked was when I presumed I could leave ftp service running on my office machine, on a t1 line. Now, I no longer have anything other than ssh available, and that only accepts connections from trusted machines (my department, my home).
On Wed, 19 Oct 2005 23:19:35 -0400, Allan Adler Frankly, I don't actually think every package in your system is insecure. Things...
Well, it probably would not run very well on your machine.
--
David L. Johnson
o I believe that the motion picture is destined to revolutionize `-(, our educational system and that in a few years it will supplant ()() largely, if not entirely, the use of textbooks -- Thomas Edison, 1922
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