[geeks] Re: [rescue] This Just In: HP to buy Compaq

[Gregory Leblanc]

On Wed, 2001-09-05 at 19:14, Joshua D Boyd wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 05, 2001 at 12:55:42PM -0400, Dave McGuire wrote:
> >   I run Redhat on my Linux box because that's the distribution that I
> > always hear about.  Is there a better alternative that I should be
> > running?
> 
> It depends on what you are looking for.  At school debian is used because
> key people feel that apt-get works better than the redhat
> equivalent. 

And they're absolutely right, depending on which features you're talking
about.  If you're just looking for a tool to update the currently
installed packages to the latest releases, then they both offer the same
functionality.  If you're looking for a tool that will go out, find
packages, download the packages and their dependancies, then apt-get is
very clearly the competetive choice.

> Mandrake and suse seem to be more aggressive about supporting
> the cutting edge desktop features, which probably cuts into stability a
> little.  Slackware seems to appeal to do it yourselfers.

I'm not very familiar with SuSE, but Mandrake has a tendancy to ship
-pre alpha- software.  As in, they'll ship a piece of software that
doesn't even have a list of what it's going to do, let alone have those
features implemented yet.  It does detract from stability from what I've
seen, but it also gets them some really Cool Shit (tm).

> Redhat generally seems to be the vanilla choice.

Sure, if you want to call it that.  Its the best known Linux variant,
and they've made some pretty good design choices (at least, ones that I
like).  chkconfig is blatantly stolen (the idea, anyway) from Irix, and
a few other handy utils like that (which I can't remember offhand).

> The reality is that all differences are cosmetic and if a program supports
> Redhat only, a few hours of rearranging should force it to work on any
> linux.

If that.  For a lost of things, you can simply install the Red Hat
package on another distribution.  I've installed quite a few binary
packages designed for Red Hat on Debian and Mandrake, and had them work
flawlessly (well, as flawlessly as they worked on Red Hat, anyway.  :-))

> running on my file server.  I more recently tried debian for apt-get, but
> I've found it rather disappointing.  I probably am just stupid, but I just
> can't figure out how to force a package to install when the depencies
> haven't been met (usually because I chose to install a package via source
> code).  I will most likely go back to Redhat the next time I reinstall,
> but Mandrake or Suse are also possibilities.

I'm not sure how to do that via apt, but dpkg -f should "force" package
installation.  I've found that my time learning to package software has
paid off pretty well in that upgrades/removals are really clean. 
Sometimes installing from source works out well, but I always make sure
that it installs into it's own prefix (/opt/gnome_cvs, or some such).

> From what I hear, NetBSD and OpenBSD look really great.  I rather like GNU
> everything, but that can be installed ontop of *BSD.  The only problem is
> that desktop features that I want aren't as well supported.  But that
> shouldn't be a problem with most RISC boxes or server boxes.

Which desktop features?  I wouldn't use OpenBSD for a desktop, but
mostly because it comes configured with all useful services disabled. 
:)  NetBSD looks pretty nice, but I haven't had time to set it up as a
desktop.  I might be doing that with my DEC 3000 box, now that I've
"found" a 19" monitor for it.
	Greg