[SGVLUG] linux w/o broadband

[Dustin Laurence]

On Tue, Sep 19, 2006 at 02:10:19PM -0700, Claude Felizardo wrote:

> One of they guys here at work will be traveling overseas for vacation
> and is bringing a system for a relative who is a CS major.  Apparently

I'm with Jeff (I think it was): a CS major probably should be choosing
what she needs.  Failing that, I'd suggest burning a whole set of Debian
DVDs (assuming the system has a DVD drive--if not, get one, they're
pretty cheap).  On dial-up, having the actual disks for pretty much
everything in the world would be a real godsend.

Ordinarily I'd say Debian Stable isn't the right thing for a desktop,
but the "no changes we don't have to make" policy ought to make it more
feasible to keep up to date on security patches over dial-up.  Still not
great, though, particularly for the first "bring it up to date" run
after installing from optical disks.

A more up-to-date distro is probably going to have a greater network
load to keep up to date.

That said, if she's going to school at a lowest-common-denominator
factory she's never seen anything but Java on Microsoft Windows, so she
might be totally dependent on that.  It might be worth checking to make
sure she wants a Linux box.  Yes, she *should* have one anyway, but.....
:-)

Dustin
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