[ale] College Linux tips, advice, cool stuff?

[Byron A Jeff]

On Mon, Jun 21, 2004 at 01:01:39AM -0400, Jay wrote:
> Hi all, just wondering if anyone has tried College Linux,

One of my students in my Intermediate Unix class loaded it last semester.
So I vicariously got a chance to see it in action.

> and if so, if 
> they have any tips or advice for me.  I was given a PIII to play with so 
> I put on FreeBSD, which didnt want to work with my mouse or X in 
> general, so I decided to hold off on FreeBSD and went with College Linux 
> instead.  It seems pretty decent from the few minutes I've spent on the 
> box so far. 

Cool.

> 
> Anything that's helpful to know about College Linux right off the bat?  

The most important thing to understand that it's a Slackware variant. So
this means a couple of things:

1) It uses Slackware packages. Check out http://www.linuxpackages.net for
   packages.
2) It uses the BSD style init startup. So anything that you read about
setting up services under RedHat, Mandrake, Debian, and the like won't
work as they all use SysV init style scripts.

> Any cool things about it? Useful features?   Fun stuff? 

It's all Linux. The biggest separations seem to be autodetect/autoconfig and
package management styles. It's one reason that Knoppix/Debian is starting
to become my distro of choice. My class and I just finished a proof of
concept transplant of a Knoppix CD image into a Windows NTFS filesystem. So
it's possible now to download Knoppix unto an unmodified XP/Win2000 harddisk
and boot it without ever making an actual CD.

Wish you luck in your exploration.

BAJ