[Novalug] Which linux to install??

Tom Rhodes trhodes@FreeBSD.org
Sun Nov 19 22:08:53 EST 2006


On Sun, 19 Nov 2006 20:11:27 -0500
James Ewing Cottrell 3rd <JECottrell3@Comcast.NET> wrote:

> Chris Sykes wrote:
> 
> > Haven't actually made it out to one of the meetings yet but I keep
> > putting it on my calendar.
> >
> > I just wanted to pipe in about slackware not having a decent package
> > management system. Personally I use slapt-get and swaret to augment
> > the 'packagers' that come with slackware. Makes installing and
> > removing packages and updating to new version releases a snap.
> 
> AFAIK, all swaret buys you is library dependencies. While useful, that 
> doesn't capture the fact that CVS depends on RCS, which in turn depends 
> on DIFF. or that programs that send mail depend on mail-transport-agent, 
> which is what sendmail, postfix, exim, or qmail provide.
> 
> But where RPM and DPKG (and maybe Portage too, I haven't fully grokked 
> it yet) really shine is in capturing the BUILD process. I can't count 
> the times that someone has told me to rebuild something complex like 
> sendmail, apache, or MySQL, but the configuration options have been 
> "lost". A SPEC (or the dpkg equivalent, I can't remember what the name 
> is) file captures the entire process.
> 
> You know SunOS was a nice system too. But you won't learn anything if 
> you don't keep up with modern systems.

Yes, but they gave us the vnode.  And BSD gave us usr/bin and
usr/sbin for better separation of utilities.

> 
> > Personally I use gentoo on my desktops and slack/gentoo/debian/openbsd
> > on my servers.
> 
> BSD is a dead-end too. While 4.3BSD was at one time The Standard, 4.4BSD 
> gratuitously changed the man pages,  make, and several other stuff. 
> Their insistence on creating disk slices inside partitions is annoying too.

I'm really not sure about this.  I'm not sure I agree about it
being the standard at one point.  It was a nice improvement to
the original UNIX via the "add on collection" but seemed to have
a large split between the users of BSD and original UNIX from Bell
Labs.

> 
> Finally, Get With The Program and put ISOs up on the mirrors! Don't make 
> me work that hard just to install the system.

???

Is this still an issue?  I thought we fixed this two years ago,
are some mirrors not following suit?

> 
> > If you are (re)learning your skills for use in the mainstream coporate
> > linux world I would stick with RH or SUSE. Current issues with SUSE
> > not withstanding.
> 
> Probably the wisest because that is what the vendors (IBM, Dell, HP) 
> support. But Debian and K?Ubuntu might be good choices too.
> 
> > -Chris 
> 
> JIM
> _______________________________________________
> Novalug mailing list
> Novalug@calypso.tux.org
> http://calypso.tux.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/novalug
> 


-- 
Tom Rhodes



More information about the Novalug mailing list