Mac Vs Windows Showdown

[ksigmtsu]

You make a good point about Arch. However people swear by its speed and reliability.

Debian has a "stable" branch which is de facto standard of "stability" from what I understand. (I've been out of the Linux world for five years now since moving to Apple's platform... although I have some Linux lappys and my server is FreeBSD.)

Since you are building boxes and basically creating a one-trick pony "appliance" (a sales dialing machine with database interface) I would think you would use a "cut down" version of Linux or one that you customize yourself. All you need on it would be vidial (your version of it) and Sugar and X and a small-footprint window manager like Ice or Xforce or whatever will run a browser (to view Sugar.)

FreeBSD never had much "market share" because most folks use it as a headless server and not a desktop distro... as it (like Arch) is a PITA to install all of the goodies necessary for a desktop machine (fonts and stuff... that come embedded in more "complete" distos like Ubuntu, SUSE, Slackware, etc.)

Many people think Slackware is the perfect combo between customize-yourself and built-in "stuff."

The "yum" interface is not better or worse than Synaptic. Pac-man and whatever Slackware uses (I forget) are command-line only as I remember.

CentOS is the clone of RedHat Enterprise and is known to be very stable... but also very slow. I've never used it but it gets rave reviews for being stable.

If you used something like Puppy or TinyCore you might be able to put your system on old laptop hardware that you can buy cheaply. My bet is that there are tens of thousands of Thinkpad/Lenovos that come off of lease from large corporations. I wonder how someone could buy a couple of hundred of them?

The iso build of vicidial already comes with a stripped down opensuse, vicidial, and vtiger on the disk, with basically everything non-vital removed. As long as you're using the right hardware to start with, it works right out of the box.

The guys that the vicidial group do a great job on it.

I'd like to have an iso with vicidial, sugar, and my external scripts rewritten in C and pre-compiled (closed source) on the scripts that do the prioritization and line scaling, but at the moment that's a pipe dream.

 

[Jack_Merton]

I would go with Ubuntu, it's FREE! =)