I did suggest more memory, but he was hard for cash at the time and
vista was doing some stupid things anyway and it was so slow, taking 20
mins to boot that it was very difficult to speed up or fix because it
took so long to do ANYTHING. He actually got an extra gig of memory
yesterday and it has helped a lot. He is happy with Linux apart from
openoffice or rather the microsoft office lack of compatibility and said
he will still use it for the internet and most things and boot vista for
using excel and a couple of other things.

The space problem was because I had squeezed it onto his hard drive,
the point is Linux developers seem to do some stupid things like
putting rc files all over the place, now upstarts come along. Locking
down init/rc on OpenBSD takes a fair few files but on Linux you may as
well forget it. Finding the fsck is easy on OpenBSD, even though I've
found it before it's simply a pain to find on Linux, for no reason,
of course slackware is better, but not really so suited for a Windows
user. Windows is even worse try tracking down driver registry start ups.

There's many problems that could easily be prevented like the time/fsck
and kernel management, kde needing space. These are just some of the
ones I know about. OpenBSD takes the filesystem time when it is newer
and just boots and the kernel isn't full of exploits and is always
likely to work. OpenBSD thinking things through and doing things
correctly is why I am so content with OpenBSD, especially when most
people most of the time use so little of an operating system.


On Sat, 12 Jun 2010 01:28:07 +0100
Peter Kay <syllopsium@syllopsium.co.uk> wrote:

quoted text
> Maybe I'm getting on a bit, but I don't consider swapping operating system
> to be the best option in that case. Vista may be a memory hog, but it's
> usually easier in the long run to spend cash on 4GB for a laptop, than to
> install and faff around with a whole new operating system..
> 
> Linux running out of space due to kernel upgrades is obviously a
> configuration (hard disk partitioning) problem. Obviously I prefer BSD Unix
> to Linux, but the evidence does suggest the wrong Linux distribution was
> being used.
> 
> On 11 June 2010 18:16, Kevin Chadwick <ma1l1ists@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> 
> > My mates vista didn't have enough memory and was running rediculously
> > slow, he switched to Linux and it was all good but then when running
> > out of space due to so many auto kernel upgrades, kde wouldn't log in.
> > His bios battery went and so when his girlfriends mum pulled the plug
> > on his laptop at night and he booted in the morning, linux dropped to a
> > single user shell wanting fsck -fy; exit. He found setting the date
> > forwards sorted it and ended up at 2021 before he got it to me to have
> > a look.
> >
> > If OpenBSD ran flash and was easy for him to update he wouldn't have had
> > either of those problems. Maybe freebsd or pcbsd would have suited him.
> > I'm not sure.