questions about distributions

[krose at theory.lcs.mit.edu (Kyle R. Rose)]

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> RedHat - most popular, tons of financial backing, de facto standard, easy to
> install, excellent software selection, support and WWW resources, frequent
> version releases.

> Debian - great reputation for being the pursist's distro. 2.1 was a bitch to
> install. Can they keep up with the latest and greatest in their distros?  If
> not, why make the distro so huge?  Why version the distro after the glibc
> version?

I think this may be anecdotal.  Myself, I've had nothing but trouble
installing RedHat; just yesterday, a RH 6.1 graphical install hung
because of a script error (?? Don't they check these things)

OTOH, I run the Debian "unstable" distribution, which has given me
fewer troubles than RedHat's official releases.  It has the latest and
greatest, is very easy to install, and insanely easy to upgrade: to
upgrade over the network to the next release when it comes out, you
type

 apt-get update
 apt-get dist-upgrade

sit back, and enjoy the show.  In general, the encyclopaedia of
packages included in the distribution makes installing just about
anything very easy.  I found out once that I didn't have xfig
installed, so I just typed  "apt-get install xfig", and the package
manager downloaded xfig and all of its dependencies; no hunting around
for RPMs that are compatible with my libraries, which is a real chore
on RedHat especially since their official distro is so small.

I used to run RedHat, but the bugginess and generally "unpolished"
feel of 5.1 finally made me jump ship to Debian.  I stay with Debian
because it _works_; nothing makes me wonder, "Why the hell did they do
this?"

As far as using the system after it is installed, I would say that
Debian requires the administrator to know what s/he is doing, but is
not primitive like Slackware, which provides basically no
administrative help at all.  There are no printer or network
configurators, for instance, but the scripts controlling these things
are in the right places and are easy to parse.

I would be interested in trying SuSE at some point, but there's no
time.... =)

Kyle


- -- 
Kyle R. Rose                    MIT LCS NE43-309, Cambridge, MA
11 Winslow Avenue Apt. 2        617-253-5883
Somerville, MA 02144            krose at theory.lcs.mit.edu
617-628-0271                    http://web.mit.edu/krr/www/

Smoking crack is a way for people who couldn't afford
college to study the works of Charles Darwin.
                                 - P.J. O'Rourke
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