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Jerry Feldman wrote in a message to Mike Bilow: JF> I have been using Red Hat for the past few years. I would JF> like to start a thread on distribuitons, likes, dislikes, JF> religious opinions, etc. JF> Recently, I had to install Debian. IMHO, Debian is a more JF> complete distribution than Red Hat, it takes forever to JF> install, and lacks some of the nice system admin tools JF> that Red Hat supplies. JF> I currently have Red Hat installed on my Alpha and my Intel, JF> but I will be installing Debian on my Intel system today. I've used both fairly extensively, but I prefer Debian. I agree that the "dselect" tool takes forever to run, but that is because of its architecture. In fact, deselect is just a front-end for the real "dpkg" tool, which is quite quick. I'm sure that dselect could be enormously improved, but it is not actually necessary except for initial installation or wholesale upgrades. Also, dselect is usually run unattended once it is started on its work of resolving dependencies and installing packages. Debian is the obvious choice if your main uses involve specialized work where most of the active developers are themselves using Debian, such as amateur radio. Debian also has the "alien" tool which allows installing Red Hat "rpm" packages, which is very useful. Debian has more varied installation options, such as 1.2 MB floppies, and these may be critically important if they happen to affect you. Otherwise, Debian and Red Hat are closely matched. Red Hat is better supported commercially. If you need that level of support, then you are not going to get it from Debain at any price. The idea is that many companies have policies against using "free" software, so it helps to be able to point to an invoice for $50 and a nice box on the shelf. Finally, if something goes wrong, the Red Hat people will "take the bullet," as they say. Ironically, given the emphasis placed by Red Hat on commercial situations, Debian tends to be more stable while Red Hat tends to be more bleeding edge, in my opinion. For example, Red Hat was the first major distribution to make the jump to libc6/glibc for its own binaries, and there were a lot of problems reported in connection with that early adoption. Debian only moved to libc6 months after Red Hat had already done so, and had a fairly long period of testing and bug-fixing in preparation for the release. This by no means implies that Red Hat left bugs unfixed, and its second libc6-based release (5.1) was an enormous improvement over its first (5.0), but you have to be careful to understand that Red Hat releases may be uneven in quality and tend to follow that old saw about "x.0" releases never being any good. On the other hand, Debian tends to lag hardware support. This can be extremely annoying, as I found out recently with the Adaptec SCSI drivers that have been in flux recently. This was especially embarrassing, as I have long been active in the development work on these drivers, and I was dead in the water trying to install Debian. There are ways around this, of course, but all of them involve working around the official Debian stuff and building custom installation disks. Because Debian is a volunteer effort, sometimes things happen that would never be tolerated on a commercial project, such as taking a week or two for someone to get around to moving package updates posted by their maintainers into publicly accessible areas. On security, both Red Hat and Debian are pretty agressive about keeping up. I consider the default Debian installation to be a more secure configuration than the default Red Hat installation, but that could be argued. Certainly, both are very good about doing all of the basics, such as supporting shadow passwords, and good security demands going through the configuration and adjusting to the particular needs of the situation, such as not running servers through inetd that are unneeded. But I think I would give a slight edge on security to Debian, mainly because there is an extensive bug tracking process that is open and public. -- Mike *** Subcription/unsubscription/info requests: send e-mail with subject of "subscribe", "unsubscribe", or "info" to discuss-request at blu.org