Fwd: Etch

[kristian.hermansen at gmail.com (Kristian Hermansen)]

On 4/9/07, Matthew Gillen <me at mattgillen.net> wrote:
> 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.

Yes, I made a mistake in the command mentioned.  However, supported
packages by Ubuntu is definitely far greater than say RHEL.  Here is
Ubuntu Feisty versus CentOS 4.4.  I did not add any unsupported Ubuntu
repositories, so it should not affect the calculation.  If someone has
FC6/FC7 installed, let me know what you get.  Obviously, some
consideration needs to be had for meta-packages and virtual
packages...

$ aptitude search ~n | wc -l
23489

# yum list | wc -l
1649

> 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).

Actually, I am fairly confident in my claim.  That's partially why I
switched away from Red Hat years ago.  I urge someone to prove me
wrong here.  I would hypothesize that only Gentoo has more packages,
since it is a from-source distro.

> 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.

Yes, modern distros do, however, I filed a bug a little over a year
ago because Debian Etch did not!
http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2005/09/msg00425.html

Ubuntu has a new GUI installer which is much easier for newbies to
use.  That's why I recommend it to people starting out.  In the server
version, the install is identical to Debian, so there should be no
surprises there for seasoned veterans...
-- 
Kristian Hermansen

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