Fwd: Etch

[me at mattgillen.net (Matthew Gillen)]

Kristian Hermansen wrote:
> Tons of software choices, which makes things easier.  Not as many packages
> as Gentoo, obviously, but I believe makes the most binary packages
> available than any other Linux distribution.  Someone correct me if I am
> wrong here, but I seem to remember comparing using (dpkg -l / rpm -qa) | wc
> -l...

That set of commands would simply count the number of software packages
/installed locally/, not the total number available.  You'd want to count
packages found by dselect/apt-get against yum.  And then you'd have to take
into account weather you're comparing the as-shipped configuration vs.
allowing one to twiddle with apt-sources / yum.conf.

I don't have a ubuntu box to check, but I highly doubt that your claim above
regarding 'most binary packages' is true. Even if it is, I'd be extremely
surprised if the difference is significant (or more than a matter of choice of
packaging; ie using several small packages instead of one big one for the same
software).

> And finally, I (and many others) have found Ubuntu to be the best
> distro for laptops.  Hardware auto-configuration (like CPU frequency
> scaling) really makes it easier for the end user.  And it all fits on
> one disc which also serves as a Live CD to boot (pun intended)!

Getting a bit off topic (debian vs. ubuntu), but since you brought rpm-based
distros into the discussion, things like frequency scaling and hw auto config
are all available (and configured by default) in Fedora as well (and yes,
there's a Live CD; maybe not as polished as Ubuntu's though, since it's
relatively new).  I would imagine that pretty much any modern distro does that
stuff.

Matt

-- 
This message has been scanned for viruses and
dangerous content by MailScanner, and is
believed to be clean.