[ILUG] Re: Reccomend a distro for the offline user.

[Gavin McCullagh]

Hi Jarlath,

In gmane.user-groups.linux.ilug.general, you wrote:

> A friend of mine wants to try linux, and is looking to me. 

> But he has no internet connection, so it must be stable (ish) from the start. 

It's probably not an ideal way to pick a distro but if it will never be
online, you might have to think in terms of what he might needs but certain
distros cannot distribute.  For example:

 - libcss (dvd decryption)
 - MP3 encoding/decoding support
 - win32 codecs
 - ....

If you pick a Free distro such as Debian, Fedora or Ubuntu, these will
definitely not be on the cd.  I'm unsure whether a commercial distro such
as lindows, xandros or suse might provide some/all of these.  Otherwise
will have to go online somewhere to get them.  I guess you could make a
cdrom of Christian Marillat's unofficial archive in order to add these
packages to debian/ubuntu.  

Basically what I'm saying is you need a distro which is as self-contained
on cdrom as possible and that if he requires patented/proprietary stuff
that may be an issue.

> He wants to edit videos from his digital camcorder and do regular desktop 
> stuff.

I don't know too much about what video codec encoder/decoders are
distributed but you might have some difficulties there too.

A friend is using ubuntu offline.  I set it up for her and added much of
the above stuff.  I recently made the mistake of upgrading from the Hoary
cd.  This broke all gstreamer mp3 stuff :-( and I had to bring it online to
upgrade the proprietary stuff.  Be careful with offline upgrades like this.

Hope this helps,

Gavin

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