Which Linux to host Hercules?

Tony Harminc

Jan 28, 2005

Folks - it's been a long time since my early involvement with
Hercules, and I am now in a position where I want to do some serious
playing around on some Intel boxes. I've previously used Herc under
Windows, but this time for various reasons I want to aim for Linux.
But which one? It used to be that Red Hat was the obvious choice, but
with the Enterprise Linux vs Fedora thing, it's not clear that that's
a good choice anymore. (Just in passing, and without wanting to open a
huge debate that's doubtless been well covered elsewhere: how can Red
Hat get away with *selling* Enterprise Linux apparently without
providing downloadable source? Or do they just hide it well?) I still
have RH9 on CDs somewhere - is there any sense to installing such an
old version at this stage?

Anyway - my next stop in the Linux distribution circuit would be
Debian, which sounds like a nice mix of hobbyist with serious, done by
people with good attitude. And Knoppix is built on Debian, and it is a
joy to just boot up and use. But a quick try at a Debian install goes
much less smoothly than I expected, which gives me pause. Not that I'm
scared of learning about its little quirks, and perhaps I was
expecting too much, but automatic recognition of hardware seems weak.

Then there's Suse, which seems to be the Linux of choice for running
*under* Hercules, so it perhaps makes sense to run it as the host too.

Doubtless there are other distributions that people love for various
reasons, and I'd like to solicit advice on those too.

Many thanks...

Tony H.

4:22 pm

Re: [hercules-390] Which Linux to host Hercules?

Adam Thornton

Jan 28, 2005

On Jan 28, 2005, at 10:22 AM, Tony Harminc wrote:
> Anyway - my next stop in the Linux distribution circuit would be
> Debian, which sounds like a nice mix of hobbyist with serious, done by
> people with good attitude. And Knoppix is built on Debian, and it is a
> joy to just boot up and use. But a quick try at a Debian install goes
> much less smoothly than I expected, which gives me pause. Not that I'm
> scared of learning about its little quirks, and perhaps I was
> expecting too much, but automatic recognition of hardware seems weak.
>
> Then there's Suse, which seems to be the Linux of choice for running
> *under* Hercules, so it perhaps makes sense to run it as the host too.
>
I like Debian but I hardly ever install it on systems where I need X or
sounddrivers or whatever. It seems to do OK finding network hardware
most of the time.

SuSE, IMHO, has been going downhill since Novell bought it.

These days, though, on the desktop, I use Mac OS X.

Adam