On Thu, Aug 14, 2003 at 01:01:51AM -0400, Aaron wrote: > On -2471-Wed, Aug 13, 2003 at 06:28:50PM -0500, Ron Johnson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > spake thus, > > My mixed sarge/sid system has worked very well for me, with minimal, > > surmountable issues. Certainly less than I had when trying to > > upgrade RPM-based systems. > > This is a repeated reply, but I had to add that I actually have an > RPM-based system (it's RedHat Valhalla, or 7.3 for the > digit-using-folk), and I must admit that the RPM format is an > admirably HORRIBLE package management system. Unless you really want > to use RPM for EVERYTHING (and that's really hard to do on a desktop > machine where you need... Hmm... Flexibility?), your dependencies > immediately get screwed up, not to mention RPMs thinking they're > installed when they're not and not letting you uninstall them. In my > experience, it's a mess. > > I love Debian.
Let me tell everyone a bit about how I started to use debian. I used redhat for some years, doing no upgrades, just downloading new versions and doing a reinstall. Actually upgraded someones system one time, took a _very_ long time. Sucked after that. Anyway, I started to dislike it more and more and did the linux-from-scratch thing. That was nice, but if something broke, it was hard to set it up again. With my battery doing strange things, I had some hard power downs and that wasn't too good for my ext2 system. I couldn't really upgrade unless I recompiled everything, so my system became less and less stable. Then I decided that I would be better off building my own distro. I would _know_ what was were and why, and I would learn a lot. I used RPM for packaging (didn't know debian or APT even existed, really). I was almost done running a server-like environment (I won't tell you how much time it cost me) and it was rather clean. Then, I finally got fed up with rpm. Building packages for it is a PITA. Googling I found debian, read up on dpkg and instantly liked it, especially with that fakeroot thingy. So I downloaded them, tried to compile and run them. Lucky for me, I had some strange errors running fakeroot (my makefile wouldn't run as root, mysteriously) and I decided to download debian, run dpkg under debian and check what was wrong with my system. So I downloaded it, installed it on some (small) partition, was not entirely impressed by the installer, but _was_ impressed by the system. Needed some time to adjust, but let's say I decided to throw an awful-lot-of-months of work out of the window and wipe my hard drive clean and use debian all in two days. Thanks for saving me, ;-) David -- Hi! I'm a .signature virus. Copy me into your ~/.signature to help me spread! -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
