chris:b Posted July 19, 2003 Report Share Posted July 19, 2003 I thought it's time for me to try another Linux distribution. So that I can say: I'll stay with Mandrake. I was looking for a one cd-distro, free to download, easy for newbies, ready for multimedia. JAMD 0.0.6b - based on RedHat. Reduced to KDE. Optimized for i686. 1. Download. There are only a few mirrors. Had a slow download. 2. Installation. I have chosen 'advanced', basically a standard RedHat installer starts - with modified grafics and packages. 20 minutes. The first problem was, that the jamd installer could not create a start floppy - kernel too big, was the message. Lilo had not been written to the mbr. The install procedure ended up with some strange errors about the video resolution. - I had to boot into mandrake and modify Lilo. 3. No problem with the first booting of JAMD. In a few steps you are configuring a user account, network ... right into KDE, in my native language. First impression: the Acqua theme which was new to me. And a bit of a childish wallpaper as background. 4. Packages: JAMD comes with Mplayer incl. dvd out of the box (if you know how to change the settings from /dev/dvd to /dev/hdx), xmms with mp3 support, preinstalled flash and java (you have to activate it, though), cdrw and dvd drives and floppy automounted. Our LAN was via samba immediately up and running. Internet via router the same. GIMP, OpenOffice, evolution ... and a LOT of games. 5. Updating - I never saw apt-get and synaptic. So the first thing I did was updating JAMD, using synaptic which was very easy. Then I installed additional software which was not on the install cd: kmail, knodes, gftp. Very easy. - What about installing something manually I thought. Okay, downloaded the new Bluefish - and installed it the rpm -iv - way. Without problems. I have not figured out if and how you are able to install RedHat packages, I guess it would be quite easy to set up sources, or just download the rpm's ,a downloads' dir was alreday made under /home/$user/ by the installer. 6. JAMD doesn't create entries in the fstab for other (windows or linux) partitions. You have to make mountpoints manually. 7. On my system (Intel 4, 2GIG, 256 RAM, Nvidia Gforce4 64 MB) it's very fast. But I can't see a big difference in speed to mandrake. Now I am booting back into MDK ... --anna Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest oberon Posted July 20, 2003 Report Share Posted July 20, 2003 Thanks, Anna, this information is just in time for me. I was trying to download JAMD but couldn't because of poor conection. I also didn't like that 0.0...beta number, since Linux is a very new toy for me. So I'll better put more effort into making my ML9.1 work. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chris:b Posted July 20, 2003 Author Report Share Posted July 20, 2003 oberon, jamd is RedHat - but with KDE only and additional packages. Because you had already RH installed and (what I read) that did not solve your stability problem, its prob wasting your time to try another distro as long as you don't know what causes your problems. But I might be wrong here. Anyway, after playing a bit with jamd I must confess that it is very attractive, stable, fast, and there is something I can't explain: though using the same video driver it looks much nicer, sharper ... or so. I would love to see such a 'tweak' for Mandrake, one cd, reduced to the max, concentrated on a workstation and a home user, no matter if GNOME or KDE. If I could get a second life ... or a day could have 48 hours. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest oberon Posted July 20, 2003 Report Share Posted July 20, 2003 If I could get a second life ... or a day could have 48 hours. These are exactly my words... :) Red Hat worked fine, no problems at all. But, first, I feel that it is slower than Mandrake, and second, I just cannot accept that failure with Mandrake. Now I came to a conclusion that the problem is in my video card, GeForce2 GTS. I just installed a new driver for it, but it didn't help. So one day I'll try JAMD anyway but first will get some experience with Red Hat... If I won't find some solution for my Mandrake problem. Now I changed the video card driver to standard vesa, and it works ok but provides only 1024 x 768 resolution which looks ridiculously on my monitor... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
shen Posted July 22, 2003 Report Share Posted July 22, 2003 Actually you can install RH9 packages in JAMD. You just have to edit your sources.list file in /etc/apt/ You can read all about apt for rh at http://freshrpms.net/apt/ and you can goto www.pclinuxonline.com and find several RH apt repositories you can add. The only thing you lose is the i686 optimizations. The only way to get any of the development packages is using RH9 packages. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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