Springdale 8.0 works fine for me; easy installation without a lot of surprises. Base software package is more that adequate for what I need to use this old laptop for; web-browsing, email, document creation and printing. Printer setup was done via Terminal using the following commands to get my HP printer online:
sudo yum install hplip
sudo yum install hplip-gui
hp-setup
Simple and straightforward desktop with no surprises.
The more I use computers the more I appreciate that 'simpler is better' and this distro meets that mark...
I give this an 8.5
Version: 8.4 Rating: 7 Date: 2021-07-15 Votes: 5
I just stumbled upon this one by accident, browsing through the trending lists of Distrowatch. All at the bottom was Springdale. It tickled my interest, especially when I saw that it was Red Hat derived and that the project came from Princeton. Now there's a reference I thought so I installed the iso on the Asus x75v. Quite effortless I may say, apart from the rather slow install and lengthy update process afterwards.
While I can totally relate to how this is a perfect distro in an educational environment, it still offered me some problems. For some reason, it would not mount ntfs partitions. I chose the workstation install but found out that there was still a lot of tweaking and installing to do. The software center is rather scarsely populated so you need to go by other repositories. If you are not willing to get your hands dirty then you might have to pass on things like VLC, to name just one example. So, OK, I could get my work done using Springdale but overall the distro looks far from trendy. Out of the box choices are few.
minus points: rather dated, few applications out of the box, needs tweaking to suit your taste
on the positive side: it is a solid base to built a more customized system, clean and fast
Version: 7.5 Rating: 10 Date: 2021-01-11 Votes: 3
It’s rarely I give full marks to anything but this one deserves it. I’m actually using 7.9 which isn’t available to select as an option here. The speed apart even on an ancient Samsung RV415 is amazing. Using the net installer and selecting KDE gives you a KDE4 system with all the things we lost when this ‘upgraded’ to Plasma5. There simply isn’t a better looking or more configurable desktop weather app that YAWP and the system monitor too is far better than the ‘new’ Plasma5 equivalent. Plus you can mix theme components such as having a Phoenix analog clock with the Blue Sora main theme, none of which you can do with Plasma5. Font changes migrate into your whole system instead of leaving bits of it unchanged. I’ve now got this installed into 5 very different hardware systems and none of them have given a moments trouble. Just make sure to enable the two additional repos listed on their site. Even so you will likely need some .rpm packages plus maybe one or two of their dependencies as separate downloads that aren’t available using a straightforward ‘yum install’. Most of these are available as CentOS packages. I needed packages or additional components for some games, qBittorrent, Gnumeric, Roboto fonts and GkrellM plus ‘ntfsprogs’ so my Seagate external drive would mount. balenaEtcher has it’s own repo and that was it for me. Saved all these to a folder for use on other machines and adding all these extras took less than 10 minutes. This is truly a system for people who prefer to work with it rather than play with it although there’s nothing wrong with distro hopping if that’s what you like to do. Just set and forget with years of support still ahead. So many people still calling this a CentOS clone whereas it’s a custom Red Hat based distro and was out long before CentOS was dreamed up.
Springdale 8.0 works fine for me; easy installation without a lot of surprises. Base software package is more that adequate for what I need to use this old laptop for; web-browsing, email, document creation and printing. Printer setup was done via Terminal using the following commands to get my HP printer online:
sudo yum install hplip
sudo yum install hplip-gui
hp-setup
Simple and straightforward desktop with no surprises.
The more I use computers the more I appreciate that 'simpler is better' and this distro meets that mark...
I just stumbled upon this one by accident, browsing through the trending lists of Distrowatch. All at the bottom was Springdale. It tickled my interest, especially when I saw that it was Red Hat derived and that the project came from Princeton. Now there's a reference I thought so I installed the iso on the Asus x75v. Quite effortless I may say, apart from the rather slow install and lengthy update process afterwards.
While I can totally relate to how this is a perfect distro in an educational environment, it still offered me some problems. For some reason, it would not mount ntfs partitions. I chose the workstation install but found out that there was still a lot of tweaking and installing to do. The software center is rather scarsely populated so you need to go by other repositories. If you are not willing to get your hands dirty then you might have to pass on things like VLC, to name just one example. So, OK, I could get my work done using Springdale but overall the distro looks far from trendy. Out of the box choices are few.
minus points: rather dated, few applications out of the box, needs tweaking to suit your taste
on the positive side: it is a solid base to built a more customized system, clean and fast
It’s rarely I give full marks to anything but this one deserves it. I’m actually using 7.9 which isn’t available to select as an option here. The speed apart even on an ancient Samsung RV415 is amazing. Using the net installer and selecting KDE gives you a KDE4 system with all the things we lost when this ‘upgraded’ to Plasma5. There simply isn’t a better looking or more configurable desktop weather app that YAWP and the system monitor too is far better than the ‘new’ Plasma5 equivalent. Plus you can mix theme components such as having a Phoenix analog clock with the Blue Sora main theme, none of which you can do with Plasma5. Font changes migrate into your whole system instead of leaving bits of it unchanged. I’ve now got this installed into 5 very different hardware systems and none of them have given a moments trouble. Just make sure to enable the two additional repos listed on their site. Even so you will likely need some .rpm packages plus maybe one or two of their dependencies as separate downloads that aren’t available using a straightforward ‘yum install’. Most of these are available as CentOS packages. I needed packages or additional components for some games, qBittorrent, Gnumeric, Roboto fonts and GkrellM plus ‘ntfsprogs’ so my Seagate external drive would mount. balenaEtcher has it’s own repo and that was it for me. Saved all these to a folder for use on other machines and adding all these extras took less than 10 minutes. This is truly a system for people who prefer to work with it rather than play with it although there’s nothing wrong with distro hopping if that’s what you like to do. Just set and forget with years of support still ahead. So many people still calling this a CentOS clone whereas it’s a custom Red Hat based distro and was out long before CentOS was dreamed up.
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