On Sun, Jun 15, 2025 at 03:33:29PM +1000, terryc wrote:
> On Sat, 14 Jun 2025 23:20:50 -0400
>
> So long as you can CLI a basic static network connection, you have
> access to the Devuan/Debian repositories and can install anything not
> on the basic installation media.

I have just installed an excalibur on a new laptop, and I must say that
it was not user friendly. There was no obvious help or release note to
check. I really could not recommend duvuan to a newbie.

Although I am very experienced with linux and have daedalus running on
one of my machines and prefer CLI in almost all circumstances, I still
found it hard to get the network set up for a static connection. Part of
that was that I had not needed to configure a network for a long time
and the other was *finding a text editor* ! Also I find the overwhelming
documentation for ip very hard to penetrate: I was still used to the old
reasonably simple 'route'. I did find the special man page for ip-route
eventually which was bit better.

The only text editor on the application menu (I had chosen XFCE) was
mousepad which I could not even run as root because of display access.
I got around that by editing a copy and then moving it as root.
Originally I tried vim and was dismayed to find that it was not
installed. Later on I remembered nano, tried it and there it was.
Subsequently I found tiny vim or what ever it is called.
At this point I did not have any version of locate installed. I guess I
should have used find /bin/ ...

But if I struggled despite many years configuring linux on a whole
variety of machines and a fair understanding of networking, how would a newbie fare?

I hope that this is not too off topic.

ael