George Bonser wrote: > > On Mon, 8 Mar 1999, Jesse Evans wrote: > > > I feel that most of the press coverage of Linux has been tainted by > > the > > commercial marketing efforts of certain distributions. If I were a writer > > and > > had no knowledge of the subject matter of my current task, I would first > > look > > to other media to see what gets the most play and work from there. If > > Debian is > > to suceed in the Linux markeplace they need to increase their marketing > > influence, but I think that's not their real goal; they instead want to > > create > > the best distribution available and hope that those who truly care will find > > their way through the Linux jungle. > > Which brings up a point I have oten pondered, if Red Hat's install is so > great, why doesn't Debian just COPY it ... massage it a bit to make it use > some different paths, etc, and THEN concentrate on IMPROVING it. Their > current method of trying to invent a better wheel from scratch seems to be > a waste of resources. It appears to be a(nother) very egotistical stance > on the part of the Debian developers. Hell, just use the best thing that > is out there, modify it to fit your needs, and then improve on it from > there. Otherwise they are always going to be trying to catch up and > wasting resources. > > Maybe if Debian could identify the weak points in the distro, adopt better > ways from other distros as an intermediate measure and then get them > completely integrated as time goes by might allow much faster progress and > a more useable distro in the meantime. > I agree somewhat, but... I had done 3 or 4 RedHat installs until I encountered a certain old machine at work (486/33, 2 SCSI controllers). I could not get a RedHat install (5.1 or 5.2) to work. Period. No way, no how. Always started swapping like crazy at a certain point, about the time I started partitioning the disks.
Tried Debian for the hell of it, worked the first time, didn't find it unduly difficult. I guess what I'm saying is: * I'm not sure the installation itself needs radical fixing. * Please preserve robustness. * Maybe we need to represent a clear alternative. * Maybe RedHat has its priorities wrong (flash over functionality?). On that last point, let me insert another bit of personal experience: I was installing RedHat 5.1 on my machine at home, and got to the disk partitioning stage. I could not do what I needed to do from Disk Druid. The sequence of steps needed to partition a certain way was simply not accessible from the (pseudo-)GUI. So I used fdisk and could do it without any problem. What I'm saying there is that if you provide a GUI, you better be willing to spend a *lot* of time thinking it out and debugging it, because doing it right is a lot more complex than most people realize. (I know, I've written commercial software). Otherwise, you trap people instead of enabling them. So far, I feel this way about these two major distributions: * For a machine that I want to just play with a bunch of shit on, I'd pick RedHat. There's RPMs of everything under the sun out there; some of them work great, some are shit; they all install and uninstall *real fast*. That's what I want for my home machine, especially since its fast and has a lot of disk space, so I can store and run all that shit I download. * For a machine that needs to be ultra-consistent, dependable, up-to-date, locked down, I'd pick Debian. dselect and dpkg contribute to most of those qualities. That's what I want for any server that I use for work, especially since it's likely to be some old weird 486, where you *need* all those Debian installation floppies with all the drivers. (Hell, come to think of it, it might even be a m68k machine, in which case RedHat wouldn't even be an alternative...) The other thing is that I know everything on the CD-ROM is free, and free/contrib/non-free is clearly identified on the ftp sites; that's important to know in a work setting -- nothing ideological about it at all. I wonder how the rest of you feel about this distinction I've made?
