The Linux Distribution Game

Ladislav Bodnar writes: "I have installed and used many Linux distributions. The editorial, entitled The Linux Distribution Game is the result of my personal experiences - it aspires to be a gentle introduction to the many distributions out there. The rest of the DistroWatch site provides pure facts; this is the only exception, although I promise to be as unbiased as possible." This page is nearly worth it for the logos alone; the links to obscure and semi-obscure distributions are a nice resource.

Comments

Best Icon

[Spicy Bisquit]

Clearly goes to Icepack.

Re:Best Icon

[Jim42688]

what? not really.
coolest icon goes to icepack

correction:

[Anonymous Coward]

In their page for debian, I noticed that for Debian, they said that the default desktop was "GNOME".

The policy of Debian is NOT to have a default desktop, and GNOME is not favored over KDE (or vice versa).

The default window manager is WindowMaker.

The URL is
http://www.distrowatch.com/debian.htm

Re:correction:

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, that's true... Another point to note is that until Redhat 6.x, KDE was the default desktop. This is incorrect in the distrowatch page too...

-john

Re:correction:

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats funny, I installed debian last week.. when I rebooted, it ran some installer program which told me it was installing xwindows, gnome etc. then proceeded to do it. No mention of KDE at all, I had to manually apt-get the kde packages and kdm for login. When I tried to find out why I went to the kde debian page, where the packager says "for many reasons, kde will never be the default debian desktop..."

Re:correction:

[Anonymous Coward]

It shouldn't do this. Actually, I think the default is twm.

Look at the dependencies for:

in stable:
http://packages.debian.org/stable/x11/task-x-win do w-system.html

in sid:
http://packages.debian.org/unstable/x11/x-window -s ystem.html

Re:correction:

[dbarclay10]

What probably happened was some dependency issues. You *were* using Sid, after all, so all bets are off ;)

Anyways, that package you installed was the "desktop environment" package. It includes KDE, GNOME, and X. Unfortunatly, the "kde" metapackage(which is what the "desktop environment" metapackage tries to use) isn't currently installable due to some issues with KOffice.

So, in conclusion, had you installed and upgraded to Sid a week ago, you'd have gotten KDE :) The moral of the story? Don't use Sid and bitch - choose just one ;)

Re:correction:

[Mathetes]

The page only lists released versions. KDE was not released as a part of the Debian 2.2 release. The only "desktop" included in Debian 2.2 is GNOME.

Re:correction:

[PurpleBob]

How is WindowMaker more "default" than GNOME is? I've never installed WindowMaker on Debian and it has never even suggested that I install it.

Re:correction:

[fault0]

> The page only lists released versions.

Unstable
sid

Testing
woody

What are these columns for?

Wow...

[bdesham]

Maybe I can actually pick a distribution now! 'Course, I have Mac OS X, which is a lot like Linux, but I suppose this will be handy just the same.

Hey, good page...

[connorbd]

I'd prefer a bit more in-depth reviewage, but I guess you can only do so many install/wipe cycles before you get bored. What would be really useful would be a page with a number of these reviews for smaller distros.

/Brian

Sounds fun

[Burritos]

Why aren't any tiny Linux distros on it though?
Hasn't anybody ever used Tom's Root Boot?

Re:Sounds fun

[Anonymous Coward]

I did.

It's a good reconfiguration and troubleshooting disk.

Not a full-blown distro, more like an essential tool for sysadmins.

What's wrong with RedHat?

[Bud Dwyer]

I took a look at the site, and quite frankly, I'm overwhelmed by the number of choices. I started using Linux quite recently, and if I'd known there were this many different distributions, I probably would have stayed away.

When I started using Linux, I vaguely knew there were other distributions besides RedHat; but I knew that RedHat was the biggest, oldest, most successful Linux. So, why would anyone want to use any of the other distos? Do they seriously rival RedHat in terms of performance and ease-of-use. Do they have redhat package manager type innovation? Does anyone use them besides the people that develop them as vanity projects?

If any of the other distros do have advantages over RedHat (which I kind of doubt), then I may have to reconsider my use of Linux. I mean, if you can't get all the benefits of Linux in one distribution, what's the point? I might as well switch to WinXP, where I know that the entire company is focused on one version of the OS, not dozens of competing distros. Isn't Linux kind of shooting itself in the foot with the distro system? Wouldn't cooperation be more efficient than competition?

Re:What's wrong with RedHat?

[fault0]

> If any of the other distros do have advantages over RedHat (which I kind of doubt).

Yeah, many advantages. Depends on the distro tho, and what it's tailored for.

some things include:

1). better localization (i.e. asian distros for asian countries).
2). much better package managment (i.e. apt/dpkg in debian and debian based distros).
3). ease of use (well, this is subjective, but redhat is probably medium in ease of use, there are many distro's whose sole function is ease of use).
4). background of users (i.e, slackware is liked by people with more UNIX background)
5). choice of default packages (redhat ships default with GNOME, and many users prefer KDE, and (most) distros ship KDE default).
6). number of packages available (e.g. debian probably has the most)
7). security (i.e, some distros aim to be the most secure)
8). stablity (i.e, Debian/stable)
9). the newest pacakges ALL the TIME (i.e, Debian/unstable)

if you're wondering, I use debian :-)

Re:What's wrong with RedHat?

[Dionysus]

Problem is how you look at it. You see Windows, and you see one company behind it. You look at Linux and you see lots of companies behind them, and think of it as dilution of focus.

Thing is, it's the wrong comparison. Think of RedHat Linux, Debian GNU/Linux, Suse Linux as the equivalent of Windows. Linux, the brand, would be like wordprocessor. There are different wordprocessors out there (MSWord, WordPerfect, Lotus WordPro, StarWord etc), each made by a different company/group.

So, you do have an entire company focusing on one version of the OS (RedHat focuses only on their RedHat Linux OS). When they add a feature that everybody like, other distributions add the feature (again like WPs... MS adds a feature, and it gets copied over to WordPerfect, WordPro etc).

As to performance and ease-of-use, I would say Debian does rival RedHat in ease-of-use. Their package management system is far superior to the RPM system that most commercial dists. use.

Think of it like this, Microsoft has had for the longest time, two distributions in their company (NT and 9x line). One company, two distributions. RedHat has always only had one distribution (RedHat Linux).

Who is more focused?

Re:What's wrong with RedHat?

[nolife]

I might as well switch to WinXP, where I know that the entire company is focused on one version of the OS, not dozens of competing distros. Isn't Linux kind of shooting itself in the foot with the distro system? Wouldn't cooperation be more efficient than competition?

You seem to be missing the point of Linux... It is not just a company that decides what you need and you have to live with it. It is many companies and groups of people around the world that had a need for something that worked and produced it. Being open source, you are allowed to use it to your desire. There are two ways of looking at this. If everyone "worked" together on the same thing then unity would be an advantage for that one specific product, but what about the rest who need something slightly different? What if every developer that worked on a a mailer only did sendmail? What would happen to your choices of mailers? I do not see multiple choices as a disadvantage. I see it as more progress and more choices for myself. With XP or a one distribution world you would be STUCK with what you were given.
The reason Linux is where is at today is because of the diversity.

Re:What's wrong with RedHat?

[mikec]

I basically agree, but a minor quibble:

Redhat does make Gnome the default, as opposed to KDE. But what that means is that during installation a screen comes up, with a bunch of choices. Gnome is initially checked. Changing the default is as simple as checking KDE. I hardly think this belongs in the top 10 reasons to choose a distribution.

Re:What's wrong with RedHat?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd tell you the obvious thing: if choice bothers you and you like choices premade, go use Windows XP. I think you'll find it sucks, Win2k is better, but that's another story. I won't however give you this advice since it's clear from your posting history that you are just getting a kick out of trolling. Unfortunately, things do get a bit boring after you hit the karma cap, and I'm sympathetic to that, but this sort of anti-Linux troll is a bit played out. Furthermore, if you want to be a successful troller you need to make it less obvious by making stupid statements like "redhat package manager type innovation" - please - RPM "innovation"?

Re:What's wrong with RedHat?

[fault0]

You're right. However, some distros pay more attention to packaging their default desktop than the "alternatives". I'm not sure if RedHat is guilty of this, as I have not used it since 6.1 (when there was not a bunch of choices at install time).

Re:What's wrong with RedHat?

[rogerl]

RedHat was the biggest, oldest, most successful Linux

Ah, no, of the distributions listed, Slackware is by far the oldest. Redhat is a relative newcomer.

There is one older than Slackware, it started with a "Y", but I can not spell it. It is no longer maintainted.

Re:What's wrong with RedHat?

[robkore]

OK, here's an honest question. In the past, I have used the three major rpm based distros (RH, SuSe, Drake) and therefore never had a chance to try apt. My question is, how is apt so much better than, say, Red Carpet on a RedHat box? It works out dependency issues, just like apt does. I'm not trying to start a flamewar here, I am just wondering if apt is really so much better/easier anymore...

Re:What's wrong with RedHat?

[Anonymous Coward]

A very good point. Let's just think for a moment; what if, tomorrow, KDE suddenly somehow won the window manager war in Linux entirely, and Linux started being sold more as KDE than anything else (I'm not using KDE because I dislike it, just as an example). What would stop KDE from then selling say..oh, I don't know..subscription based services along with KDE or KOffice that are close-sourced? Other window managers. Linux forces groups to compete with each other, and in the interest of developing good software -alone-; they don't want to make the most money, or sell the most products, they simply want to be the best available option out there. And not only that, they want you to pick them for no charge or fee. -That's- competition.

Re:What's wrong with RedHat?

[sconeu]

Yggdrasil. Named after the "tree of the world" from Norse mythology.

Re:What's wrong with RedHat?

[Anonymous Coward]

And the fact that Redhat gives you a real choice is why you should use it.

Screw the ones that basically *force* you to use KDE (cough): SuSE, Caldera, Mandrake (ok, so they do offer GNOME, but it's a really shitty version).

Re:What's wrong with RedHat?

[Marcus Erroneous]

Extending that reasoning would raise the issue of why do so many companies make cars? Are all these different cars flawed? And each company makes so many different models. Is each model a different attempt to get it right? Why does each company need so many different types? Can't they just make a good car the first time? Obviously, with so many companies trying to make the same thing there are entirely too many choices. The market must not yet be mature, the products too complicated for any one company to attempt. You need to reconsider your use of cars. You should stick to trains.
But don't fly. Same problem there. Too many companies trying to make the same thing, each making more than one. This can't allow them to provide the sort of product focus that should be incumbent upon a manufacturer of so complicated and dangerous a product. Do you really want to trust your valuble, irreplaceable life to a product where the manufacturer refuses to concentrate totally on the one model they expect you to trust your life to? Or the lives of those who then have to live under the flight path of these obviously dangerous machines? Thank God they don't make operating systems!
Fortunately for you, there are safe havens! North Korea! China! Afghanistan! Quick, flee there while you can! Once there, you can relax knowing that the people in charge there are vigorously stamping out choice to protect you! Once there you can enjoy all the benefits of culture in just one culture. All the benefits of religion in just one religion (Afghanistan) or no religion if that offends you (China, North Korea). Once there, join the local party and learn the benefits of the efficiency of cooperation with the state. One country, one party, one people, one culture.
Please try not to feel too much pity for those of us that don't have the courage to leave our multi-cultural, open society. We promise not to envy you too much.

Re:What's wrong with RedHat?

[Stephen]

My question is, how is apt so much better than, say, Red Carpet on a RedHat box? It works out dependency issues, just like apt does.

The advantages are partly to do with technical differences, but perhaps mostly to do with packaging policy.

For technical differences, see this article. One of the biggest ones is that debs have a higher degree of dependency granularity than rpms. As well as Depends: and Conflicts: they have Recommends: and Suggests:.

Debian also has a carefully thought out packaging policy. And in Debian, everything is a true Debian package. There is no contrib. So a bug against the package is a bug in the system. This mindset makes a big difference to the quality of the distribution.

You might also be interested in this discussion on this theme.

Re:What's wrong with RedHat?

[smunt]

If you notice vim isn't installed on a system, you just type 'apti vim' and a couple of seconds later you can use vim. (I have aliased apti='apt-get install')

Re:What's wrong with RedHat?

[Anonymous Coward]

and redhat offers a shitty version of kde

Re:What's wrong with RedHat?

[Anonymous Coward]

debian packages are usually packaged much better than stuff in red-carpet.

apt just tends to work better than red-carpet.

apt has about one hundred times the packages that are available in various red-carpet channels.

apt (with debian/sid), is much more up-to-date.

Re:What's wrong with RedHat?

[Anonymous Coward]

Americans hate commmunism.. communism evil blahblah but still they love cooporation instead of competitive enviroment.

Re:What's wrong with RedHat?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bullshit... maybe you should ask that bero guy from redhat about that.

Re:What's wrong with RedHat?

[Andreas Rueckert]

There are also distros, that target specific hardware (i.e. Tiny Linux for older hardware) or a specific purpose (i.e. distros to turn your machine into a router etc). See the freshmeat.net list of distros.

Re:What's wrong with RedHat?

[Anonymous Coward]

not bullshit.. there are much better third party kde rpms for rh.

Re:What's wrong with RedHat?

[Skuld-Chan]

The word rpmfind.net should send shivers down your spine. Especially if your like me and have to support a bunch of redhat 6.2 systems.

I switched to debian and never looked back - its really nice just to be able to type "apt-get install " and have it just install it (including dependancies) - or to just be able to upgrade the distro with a single command. Debian also simplfies configuration (for the most part) - for instance I can look at all my ethernet controller configs in one file - not two, or sometimes even eight or sixteen files (yes I do have a system with 16 controllers in it). Trust me - Redhat almost seems like a toy after you really get to know debian.

Re:What's wrong with RedHat?

[Skuld-Chan]

Are they still around? The first linux distro I ever used was Yggdrasil - I still have the install disk - came with linux kernel version 1.1.x for some reason - this was in 93~94. It was as I recall a very by the seat of your pants distro - you had to install packages by hand from tar.gz files and partition and format your own disks by hand.

Re:What's wrong with RedHat?

[Anonymous Coward]

Given that the majority of slashdot's readers are intelligent (I my honest opinion, at least), can we please lay off the lame responses. YOU ARE COMPARING LINUX DISTROS TO CARS, TRAINS, and PLANES! Go browse around thinkgeek and think for a while before you post lamo flames... so sick of the quick-lipped, but slow-minded, spitful responses when someone has a bloody opinion. North Korea? China? Obviously you know nothing about communism, so shut yer face.

Now, from MY PERSONAL EXPERIENCE, I too feel that there is too much distribution competition. Why, you ask? Probably because geeks, self included, like to say, "My code is better than yours"... between 50 linux distroz and BSD variants, I too think its, somewhat, a waste of time. But, the bottom line is, I'm not planning to use 50 different distros at the same time, so who gives a f***? I install the packages I want, so I guess, in reality, I have my OWN distro regardless of which one I started with. However, it would be nice to see a little bit more unity among distroz, hence, a better OS. The fact that there are not 20 OS's that are nearly as good as Linux lends evidence to the premise that a UNIFIED effort may produce better results.

Oh, and by the way, Marcus, there are plenty of places I can go, like, oh, Canada maybe? Boy, do I sure love my Canadian passport... its great for smacking individuals like yourself on the back of the neck. Unity through hatred, my friend, it no unity at all. out.

Re:What's wrong with RedHat?

[tie_guy_matt]

I have been using SuSE since version 5.x. For years I thought SuSE was the only distro. Lately though SuSE has been pissing me off. The fact that yast is free as in beer but not as in speech always made me worry a little, but yast is a great program. But now they take their sweet old time putting the latest version on their ftp site. Once you do try to download it their site is slow as all get out (never had much luck with the mirrors.) If you try to buy a shrink wrapped copy then you have to buy the profesional version if you want to write programs (I thought gcc was free.) Then if you want xfree86 4 (3 doesn't support my video card well -- and if I upgrade why do I have to install an older version?) you have to find where the rpm is hidden (usually I just download it from xfree86.org -- that doesn't screw up the system too badly.) I wouldn't say SuSE is evil and it is great for some people (and they have done a lot of work for xfree86 and reiser which helps us all) but I think I am ready for a change. No problem! There is debian slackware, redhat, etc etc. I could even make my own distro (thinking of doing just that.) I am also pissed off at windows. However with windows I am pretty screwed! You can either buy it from Bill or break the law by downloading it. Either way SuSE is awesome compared to windows yet with windows I don't have a choice of where to get the os.

Re:What's wrong with RedHat?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who moderated this up to +3?!

Don't feed the trolls.

Re:What's wrong with RedHat?

[Anonymous Coward]

As there are much better gnome rpms for rh. Incompetence doesn't equal bias.

Re:What's wrong with RedHat?

[oldays]

Microsoft has two lines of operating system: dos-95 line and NT line. Within either line, there is no clear choice of the "best" OS. Some people (me included), still use 95 because it's stabler and faster on our hardware. Some prefer ME over 98, others 98 over ME. Same for the NT line.

The only big difference is marketing: MS touts XP and ME as _the_ OSes to get. However, they're an interested party - they want to sell their latest and greatest, and more importantly, push their technologies like .NET, and so forth.

Now, with the linux, you got 4 "big" distros. RH, Mandrake, Debian and SUSE. I think in some expo SUSE or MDK was voted as the most popular, but RH is the oldest commercial offering.

Here's a little round-up:

RedHat - oldest commercial offering with most ties with traditional companies and I think a certification problem. I heard, though, that dir structure is a bit messy and new releases are sometimes rushed and hence are quite buggy. Usually a default newbie distro.

SUSE - big in europe, getting in US too lately. At least as user-friendly as RH. Don't know much more about it. I think it uses RPM, like redhat.

Mandrake - used to be based entirely on RH with a few minor tweaks but then branched into a separate distro. At least as user-friendly as RH, uses the same RPM system, a bit less buggy?

Debian - "techies" distro. Less eye candy, more stability and security than other big 3. Apt-get package management is supposedly better and easier to use than RPM. It's not a commercial distro, it follows the same development pattern as Linux kernel itself. It does less hand-holding than other big 3 distros, so it can be intimidating to a new user. I think it also has more binary packages than any other distro.

One thing that you're missing is that separate distros often share the development effort between each other, for instance they all use the same kernel, 3 out of 4 use the same package management scheme, most of the core things are the same, and so forth. Contrast this with MS and MacOS, who obviously can't share their internals.

I think this scattering of distros is a very healthy thing. They compete, try to outdo each other, learn from each others mistakes, etc. Debian pitches to a distinctly different user base, just like with win95/NT lines.

I must also say that I don't understand your logic. Your decision should be based on whichever OS is best. If it's windows, let it be windows, if it's debian, use it, if RH, use that. Uniqueness of said OS should not figure in your decision at all.

Let me illustrate: let's say two guys come up to you and say "you must choose one box out of our offerings." One of them has one box, and the other has 10. If you choose to take the first guy's box, your pick is easier, if you take the 2nd's box, you have to choose out of ten. However, you have no idea what's in the boxes, the second guy's 10 boxes may each be filled with 100 dollar bills, while the other guy's one box might have horse manure in it or something. But here's what you're doing: you're picking the guy with one box just because he has one. That's plain silly.

By the way, I don't claim to be very accurate in my roundup of distros. Read reviews or just pick one or two and try 'em. I don't think distro reviews like the one in the story are very useful, though - each distro is a very complex system with thousands of elements interacting, it may work great on one system with one user great but still be lousy on your system with your usage patterns.

So, try one of them or not, but don't make up silly excuses like "There is only one", it's operating systems, not Highlander epos.

Re:What's wrong with RedHat?

[Anonymous Coward]

Honestly, if you can't be bothered to find out about the various distributions yourself, maybe you should just run Windows. Bottom line: it really doesn't matter which distro you run, except possibly as a matter of convenience. All applications (presumably the reason you run an operating system) work on all of them. Well, maybe not Embeddix or something, but that's not so interesting for the desktop.

So how do you choose a distribution? Probably the best way is to use what people you actually know use, especially if you're a newbie. If you don't know anyone who actually uses Linux, roll a four-sided die to choose between Redhat, Suse, Mandrake, and Debian.

Re:What's wrong with RedHat?

[mpsmps]

I'd go with a different comparison. Different distros are like different PC vendors. Intel doesn't sell PCs (for the most part). Instead, many vendors assemble PCs, configure them, ship them, and support them, just like the distro providers do for Linux.

In this analogy, asking what is wrong with RedHat is little like asking "What is wrong with Dell?" For many people, the answer would be "nothing," but the PC industry has definitely benefited from the competition without having to sacrifice compatibility. I think the same competition will keep the Linux distro providers focused on improving there distros. And that is a good thing.

Re:What's wrong with RedHat?

[nyseal]

Sounds to me like this OS & it's components are not necessarily 'free'; unless you want to deal with the bugs.

Re:What's wrong with RedHat?

[nyseal]

Let me illustrate: let's say two guys come up to you and say "you must choose one box out of our offerings." One of them has one box, and the other has 10. If you choose to take the first guy's box, your pick is easier, if you take the 2nd's box, you have to choose out of ten. However, you have no idea what's in the boxes, the second guy's 10 boxes may each be filled with 100 dollar bills, while the other guy's one box might have horse manure in it or something. But here's what you're doing: you're picking the guy with one box just because he has one. That's plain silly. What if the other ten boxes ALL have horse dung in them? Then what?

Re:What's wrong with RedHat?

[SerpentMage]

"I probably would have stayed away. "

So I take it that you also do not drive a vehicle. Because you know that there are multiple choices of that as well...

It gets my goat when I hear people say comments like this. I always compare it to a vehicle. There are hundreds of makes and yet we all seem to be able to drive each sort of vehicle (Big trucks not included). Why? Simple because even though some things may be different vehicles are generally the same and we take the time to figure out a vehicle.

Linux is the same. There are lots of distributions, but which one you want depends on your taste. For example do I want GNOME or KDE?

Those that say there should only be one distribution should also ask if they are willing to only drive one type of vehicle....

Re:What's wrong with RedHat?

[Anonymous Coward]

>> RH is the oldest commercial offering

***BBBBBZZZZZTTTTTT****
Of the ones you listed, SuSE is the oldest
according to the talk Peter Salus just gave
at ALS on friday.

Re:What's wrong with RedHat?

[PoiBoy]

I just upgraded to RH 7.2 this afternoon, and I basically have two problems with RedHat.

1. Their RPM system puts software in what I would argue is the wrong place many times. For example, if I install a new user-level application program, I put it into the /usr/local/ tree. However, many packages installed automatically by RH are scattered across several different directories. To make a long story short, it can be confusing searching for programs.

2. RH no longer ships AnotherLevel as a window manager. I had been using it (in the Lestif mode) as my WM. I installed fvwm2 (off my old 6.2 CD) and borrowed someone's rc files, but I thought AnotherLevel was a decent compromise for people who don't want the full bloat of KDE or GNOME but want more than twm.

Re:What's wrong with RedHat?

[Anthony Boyd]

I don't claim to be very accurate in my roundup of distros

Your round-up is much less accurate than the one this slashdot story is about, that's for certain. Others have already corrected your comments about Red Hat. I'll correct some of the other comments.

SUSE - big in europe, getting in US too lately. At least as user-friendly as RH. Don't know much more about it. I think it uses RPM, like redhat.

While SuSE does come with RPM (and apt-get for that matter), it uses its own YAST tool as the default package manager.

Mandrake - used to be based entirely on RH with a few minor tweaks but then branched into a separate distro. At least as user-friendly as RH, uses the same RPM system, a bit less buggy?

Mandrake is typically noted as being more user-friendly than Red Hat -- their installer can auto-configure some quite obscure stuff, and more buggy (already covered in other threads, but recent problems included the fonts, TuxRacer crashing under KDE, lockups of the drakconf if you couldn't do passive FTP, and so on).

Re:What's wrong with RedHat?

[crucini]

I might as well switch to WinXP, where I know that the entire company is focused on one version of the OS...

But would you install the corporate or consumer version? The corporate version seems to have less 'activation' issues, but could be harder to find. Or why not install Win2k, which seems more stable and better thought out than XP? But would you install the workstation or server version? The workstation version has some deliberate crippling in the TCP/IP (max 10 inbound connections per port, I think.) But maybe this can be fixed in the 'registry'. Remind me again, on which version (if any) of the OS is Microsoft focused?

I think all the major commercial distributions are roughly equivalent. At a previous job I was forced to install Mandrake. Once it was up, there was no perceptible difference from RedHat, except that it added auto-indent to vi, which annoyed me until I managed to shut it off. As for the small distros, I have no idea and will probably never have time to play with them.

Re:What's wrong with RedHat?

[crucini]

RH no longer ships AnotherLevel as a window manager.

I think that's because it is unpopular. There are three Next-like window managers: AnotherLevel, Afterstep (which I use) and WindowMaker. I think that AnotherLevel is regarded as the worst of the three. In fact, I expect Afterstep to be dropped from the distro eventually. Have to make room for a dancing paperclip in Gnome or something.

I realize that it can be very unpleasant to change window managers. However, I'd urge you to look around - they have come a long way since AnotherLevel. There are excellent light, minimal wm's (ICEwm and blackbox), nice stable mediumweight wm's (AfterStep, WindowMaker), the powerful and resource-sucking Enlightenment, and of course the two Redmondesque behemoths. (Yes I know Gnome is not a wm, it eats, or copulates with, or suckles wm's.)

Re:What's wrong with RedHat?

[Anonymous Coward]

I like this one:

Linux is like ice cream -- there are many different flavors, and many different ways to make it. Some people prefer Dryers; Some Haggan Daz; Others Ben and Jerry's.

And yet some even make their own.

Re:What's wrong with RedHat?

[Anonymous Coward]

One company just focused on XP, eh?
Wince, XP, Win2k (someone still makes the service packs), Office XP, MSEX, IIS, Explorer, MSN, .NET keyboards mice and joysticks, VB VC++ C#. Yeah, focused like a LASER.

Re:What's wrong with RedHat?

[oldays]

Well, that's my point precisely. You can't base your decision on the number of offerings alone. You have to figure out what's in the boxes, *THEN* choose.

Re:What's wrong with RedHat?

[Antaeus Feldspar]

I mean, if you can't get all the benefits of Linux in one distribution, what's the point? I might as well switch to WinXP, where I know that the entire company is focused on one version of the OS, not dozens of competing distros.

I recently started driving, and I'm apalled that there seem to be all sorts of motor vehicles out there. There are compact cars, electric cars, buses, semis with trailers -- what gives? If I can't get a single vehicle that combines all the advantages of every other motor vehicle put together, what good are these motor vehicles anyways? Maybe I should go back to horses! -- if I could decide between the Morgan and the Shetland pony.

Re:What's wrong with RedHat?

[lakeland]

Yes they do seriously rival RedHat. In my experience a smaller product never succeeds unless it is better, at least for some people

Each of the distros has different advantages, and if you want to take RedHat as a basline I could say Debian has better package management, Slackware is more configurable, Mandrake is more polished, etc. etc. Of course, they all have disadvantages relative to redhat too - e.g. debian's installer.

As for competition shooting linux in the foot. I honestly think the reason Linux has been able to catch up to MS in the desktop market is because MS hasn't had enough competition to bother innovating. Besides, all the distros are based on the GNU public licence, so whenever one invents something the others can copy it freely.

Do you think KDE would be as good as it is if gnome wasn't around? having multiple choices means if one project fails then another succeeds.

Re:What's wrong with RedHat?

[Rick the Red]

8). stablity (i.e, Debian/stable)
9). the newest pacakges ALL the TIME (i.e, Debian/unstable)

I'd like both, please. That rules out Debian. I'm looking to move off RedHat, and I'd love to try apt/get, but how long must I wait for a 2.4 kernel Debian/stable? I'd rather not apply an unoffical patch

Debian could be THE distribution

[Weird Dave]

As a Debian zealot, I claim that there's a sort of zen when using Debian. It has a sense of completeness, once installed, that I've never felt with another distribution. I like to think that if debian blatantly copied the RedHat or Mandrake installer program, then it would be the distribution to beat.

Re:Debian could be THE distribution

[Anonymous Coward]

Then why not do it??! The mandrake installer is sweet, and GPL. Replace the RPM calls with apt-get and you're all set. I swapped from mandrake where a default installed gnome+kde desktops was >2GB to debian, which default installed with kde and gnome was >500mb. With debfoster I cut this down to about 400mb, less than a quarter of the space taken by mandrake. Mandrakes build dependencies are really broken, but I guess no mandrake users recompile the given packages. Mandrake also ships a lot of beta software on the default install (five different gnome email apps, all beta!).

At work I installed redhat, which is also nice. My main problem with that is there is no mechanism for user contributed rpms (rhcontrib is dead, the new rhcontrib.bero.org has a lot of broken rpms..). Installing lyx took me a while, with broken spec files, incompatible rpm based distros, dependency on a package that isn't built for rh7.2. argh! apt-get lyx worked first time.

Whats my conclusion? Redhat is well rounded, complete sets of packages, nice install, but no community. If you want to use non redhat packages its a struggle. Debian is a pain in the arse to install and admin. Stuff doesnt get done by default (like, if I want ssh for godsakes install xauth and set up the default so I can use it, or give me the choice, for updatedb/locate install me a cron daily entry..), but debian has a huge choice of packages ready build that actually work first time. The packages are lovely, but theres no feeling of completeness. Why can't I just install kde desktop and get konq,kmail, etc installed automatically. If I don't use them, remove them automatically after a week. Mandrake is bloated and the packages are badly done, but it is really complete. One install and everything I need is there. Installing packages gets sensible things done automatically.

I still don't know which is the best. I'm leaning towards debian, but its all still horses for courses.

Re:Debian could be THE distribution

[Anonymous Coward]

I used Debian for years starting with 0.8. It is my opinion that Debian is the roughest of all of the more well known distributions. Debian lacks a lot of polish, and its quality varies exteremely depending on who is the maintainer of a particular package. But the main problem with Debian is that it is the slowest to fix its problems. Debian development is painfully slow, and problems often take a very long time to fix. Years even.

No doubt that Debian has its fans. But I'm no longer one of them, based on a lot of intimate experience with Debian.

Re:Debian could be THE distribution

[matman]

Huh? I've never had trouble admining Debian. I don't use ssh for X stuff, but Debian does put a cron daily entry in for updatedb - /etc/cron.daily/find

Re:Debian could be THE distribution

[1%warren]

But the main problem with Debian is that it is the slowest to fix its problems. Debian development is painfully slow, and problems often take a very long time to fix. Years even.

Sigh, someone is going to reply "just run Woody or Sid", which would be fine, if there wasn't a significant chance that something important will be broken. It was the slang frontend to dpkg last time I tried Potato-->Woody.

Re:Debian could be THE distribution

[fault0]

curiously, sid happens to be usually less broken than woody (until recently).

Re:Debian could be THE distribution

[Weird Dave]

Debian could benefit from a finer grained system, and I believe they are working on it. For instance, a person running "stable" might want some packages from the unstable branch (knowing it is not approved for stability), but would want the system otherwise stable.

Re:Debian could be THE distribution

[Skuld-Chan]

I agree, but the installer needs some work - other then that its great :).

One thing they could add is a much easier partitioning system - maybe something like redhat's - I'm supposed to rely on my memory on what paritions did what and so on with debian - usually it works out though.

And I ran into an interesting bug with a 2.2 installer disk - when it goes to initialize the modules it looks in the wrong dir - I ended up having to make a symlink (in the second console) to continue on with the install.

Re:Debian could be THE distribution

[Anonymous Coward]

> I like to think that if debian blatantly copied the RedHat or Mandrake installer program, then it would be the distribution to beat.

Hang around, then; Debian's supposed to get the Progeny Debian installer as part of Woody (testing). That ought to be great!

Re:Debian could be THE distribution

[prog-guru]

I like debian's installer best, I can have the base system done in 2.5 minutes (I timed myself once). Then of course I have to redo a bunch of things to get a 2.4 kernel on there (modutils, lilo.conf, modules.conf, etc).

Re:Debian could be THE distribution

[Jagasian]

Are you sure its supposed to be part of Woody? That would be great if it is true, but I would like a notable source saying that such is true before I start counting my chickens.

Re:Debian could be THE distribution

[CentrX]

There's nothing wrong with the Debian installation. It's very easy, if you just know your hardware. It's much better this way that, rather than autodetecting hardware (possibly causing the system to lock up), having an excellent, focused, console installation, and not flooding many users with things they have no need or use for, the Debian installation is quick and painless.

Re:Debian could be THE distribution

[Daengbo]

That's funny, because, after using Linux for 3 years, I decided to switch to Debian 2.2, and making my default choice of config to "Critical" the way you say, and was told that almost certainly my system would be broken. My other alternative with higher config options brought me to my knees as many packages' options were difficult to understand, and took me hours. Took me hours just for the setup, after which I needed to upgrade to XF4 to get out of 640x480 mode

Re:Debian could be THE distribution

[Malcontent]

I too love debian but don't kid yourself it too has problems. My main gripe is the branches. The stable branch is too old to do anything with, even some of the testing apps are too old, and unstable lives up to it's name. I love the fact that the debian people think of the system in a wholistic way (the completeness as you say). I love the directory structure, I love how things just magically work together and of course I LOVE LOVE LOVE apt. Somewhere there has to be a solution to having a highly integrated system with the latest apps.

PS. why LSB went with RPM and not apt will aways baffle me. Why not go with superior technology.

PPS. To all the people about to post comments about Freebsd etc please don't bother. I know they exist and they are probably great too but we are talking about linux here.

Re:Debian could be THE distribution

[lemox]

The stable branch is too old to do anything with, even some of the testing apps are too old, and unstable lives up to it's name.

Close on the first two, the last is not altogether accurate. I've found unstable to be no less stable than any of the latest editions of Redhat or Mandrake, and it is actually more cutting edge than those two. "unstable" means "changes often", it does not necessarily mean "buggy". Think about it, what branch do Debian developers use? Unstable. Do you think any bug is going to live long when it directly affects the maintainer of a package? I think not. If anything, testing (what some people erroneously see as a "safe bet") is the most bug-prone branch of debian, simply because if something goes wrong in testing, its fix goes into unstable and then must wait 2 weeks at best before moving into testing. Stick with what the developers themselves use and you won't go wrong. Any issues that crop up are usually fixed within hours, a day or two at the most.

PS. why LSB went with RPM and not apt will aways baffle me.

I don't see why. RPM is a packaging format, apt is a tool to manage Debian packages (or RPM packages, whatever floats your boat). dpkg would be a more worthy comparison (or even just .deb). I would say the LSB chose RPM simply because, aside from Slackware and Debian (AFAIK), everyone else uses it. Standards are about compatibility more than "superior technology".

Re:Debian could be THE distribution

[jlee007]

I do not follow your logic on testing being the most bug-prone branch.

In order for a package to enter testing branch, it should build for all architectures it is intended to, and it should have been in unstable for a predefined length of time (10 days?). So, while you're technically correct in saying that a bug can stay for a while in the testing branch, it can only happen when the bug existed in the unstable branch for the same amount of time, and no developer fixed it during that time.

In other words, those bugs (that get fixed within hours in unstable) simply never enter testing.

Not to mention that your statement is inconsistent with my own experience. I have been running testing for some time, and have tried to "upgrade" to unstable a few times. While the upgrades were not disasters, there were small things that stopped working. I am too lazy to figure them out all by myself, and reverted to testing which is stable enough for me.

When I want to be on the cutting edge (for example KDE and mozilla), I stay in testing and only install those packages from unstable.

Re:Debian could be THE distribution

[Anonymous Coward]

Re:
Standards are about compatibility more than "superior technology"

So are you suggesting we all standardise on windows ?

Re:Debian could be THE distribution

[CentrX]

I didn't say anything about a "default choice of config" or "Critical" or anything. If you really had been using Linux for 3 years (rather than just playing koules after booting into X all the time) all the package options would make complete sense. They're not that difficult even if you don't know much about Linux.

Re:Debian could be THE distribution

[lemox]

The bugs in individual packages are fixed in testing - dependancy related bugs are not. In testing you can essentially find yourself locked out of a particular package because its corresponding dependant packages don't get moved into testing at the same time making key packages uninstallable.

Re:Debian could be THE distribution

[Malcontent]

I have had a lot of trouble with unstable lately. First apache-ssl was broken so I ditched that and now libapache-mod-ssl is broken. The fact is becasue packages don't get updated on a schedule you run into situations where apache has been incremented but none of the packages that depend on it have. So you get a broken system.

Unstable is definately not for the faint of heart.

Linux from Scratch

[rogerl]

Linux from Scratch is really cool. I installed my own system from scratch in a couple of days. I would recommend a really fast machine though, the compiles take forever on an old 150 MHz laptop. For example, it took 8 hours to compile XFree86 4.1.0. A new 1 - 2 GHz system would cut that down to less than 1 hour.

Re:Linux from Scratch

[capedgirardeau]

I fully agree, linuxfromscratch.org is the best way to learn linux and results in the best distro you will ever have to support, the one you built from the ground up with this exceptional guide.

Go there now and build a linux box the way it was meant to be: linux from scratch!!

You will write to thank me for it later.

Re:Linux from Scratch

[brinksterz]

Also fully agree about LFS, plus they have an #IRC server for online help :O, never met a more helpfull bunch of people, At present still using Suse 7.3 :O, A warning to anyone using the update to Suse 7.3 forget it and install from scratch It sucks, the update took my Linux down :O(

Re:Linux from Scratch

[markhlfs]

> never met a more helpfull bunch of people

That's nice to hear ;-) The guys on #lfs (irc.linuxfromscratch.org) were pleased to hear that said as well!

Strangely, we actually host a distrowatch.com mirror on the linuxfromscratch.org server. (distrowatch.linuxfromscratch.org). Nice to hear the positive comments about LFS - thanks all.

Mark (BLFS Editor)

Re:Linux from Scratch

[Anonymous Coward]

I did _ it was exactly what I was looking for .
Thanks!!!

lies

[Blymie]

Why do people lie so much? Take a look at the "The Linux Distribution Game" on this link. Look at the first paragraph. In the first paragraph, the author states that :

Do everything you normally do with your computer and report back on your experience. You are not allowed to boot into Windows during that month." The friend called me 10 days later: "My Windows partition is gone!"

Then, later in the same paragraph :

"No, don't worry, I deleted it voluntarily..." He continued, his voice full of excitement: "I don't need Windows any more.....

Then, still later....

His final words were: "It is all in the way you work. Changing your routine is not easy at first, but after a month, I have adjusted completely. I am removing Windows from my computer!"

So, let me get this straight. His friend called him in 10 days, saying he had deleted windows from his computer. Later on in the phone conversation, he then said that "... after a month .. removing windows from my computer...".

You know, people are going to make up stories and post them on the web, and claim they are real, they should at least read their work to make sure it makes sense, and isn't filled with gibberish ravings. Its obvious this article isn't true, since the above statements aren't true. One of them have to be false. If one statement is false, than the article is false. What percentage of the article is false, I don't know, but at this point I have to throw it all away.

Once someone lies in an article, you can't trust the rest of it. Expecially when it starts with lies.

Re:lies

[Anonymous Coward]

mod that article up!! :)

Re:lies

[entrox]

Whoa, don't jump on that article just because something was formulated a little unclear.

I'm sure the "final words" were meant as the final conclusion of his friend after the test month and NOT his final words on phone..

Re:lies

[Blymie]

I guess you aren't putting much thought into this. If his "friend" had removed his windows parition after 10 days. How could his final words (or conclusions!) be :

but after a month, I have adjusted completely. I am removing Windows from my computer!

when:

The friend called me 10 days later: "My Windows partition is gone!"...No, don't worry, I deleted it voluntarily..." He continued, his voice full of excitement: "I don't need Windows any more.....

The point here is, is that the article _is_ untrue. Obviously his friend didn't say "I'm removing windows after a month!", because he apparently already did after 10 days.

Put another way, his friend either decided to remove windows after a month or 10 days, not both.

One of the two statements are false. If one of the statements are so obviously false and paper thin, how true is the rest of the article? How well was is proof read? If it wasn't proof read enough to sufficently take that above into account, what about important technical details?

The best case scenario is that it is a mistake on his part. This lends one to question how valid his reporting methods are, if he makes mistakes on so simple a point. The worst case scenario is that he made the story up completely. In either case, the story is untrue as it sits.

Re:lies

[Anonymous Coward]

The other guys point was that you are taking the quote out of context.

Re:lies

[Jantastic]

"The point here is, is that the article _is_ untrue."

"The best case scenario is that it is a mistake on his part."

You haven't considered the option that the article and author are 100% correct, and that the error was made by his friend on the phone: "My Windows partition is gone!"
He could as well have meant to say: "A Windows partition is gone!".
The author planned on a troubleshooting session on the phone - have you ever recovered a windows box after someone fdisked up his boot-partition?

Re:lies

[ddstreet]

I caught that too. You're totally right, a person can't say "...I deleted [Windows] voluntarily..." and then later say "I am removing Windows from my computer!". It also seems that nobody replying to you caught it, or even grasps the fact that you are in fact correct. I personally can't see how they can still not understand the stark logic of this, but I guess some people miss things...?

I also thought it was suprising that the author didn't catch it himself, since it definately detracts from his story's credibility. Oh well.

Re:lies

[ralmeida]

So, let me get this straight. His friend called him in 10 days, saying he had deleted windows from his computer. Later on in the phone conversation, he then said that "... after a month .. removing windows from my computer...".

He deleted the partition after 10 days.

Then he installed Windows again.

Then, after 1 month, he was removing Windows again.

Re:lies

[fatphil]

You're right. And that's coming from an ardent Linux spazza (~3 yrs without 'doze)

The final words may well have been "I'm keeping windows off my computer", but if so - that's whet the article should have said.

Well spotted.

FP

Re:lies

[sphealey]

So, let me get this straight. His friend called him in 10 days, saying he had deleted windows from his computer. Later on in the phone conversation, he then said that "... after a month .. removing windows from my computer...".

Or - he deleted his Windows partition after 10 days, but it took him 30 days to feel fully comfortable with the transition.

Which is consistent with the psychological rule of thumb that (on averge) you have to do something for 30 times (or 30 days) before it becomes a habit. So if for several years the person booted into Windows every morning, it would take at least 30 boots for him to start losing the habitual memory of the process, and develop a comfort level with the new process.

sPh

Re:lies

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no such rule of thumb. If there is, please, produce some evidence. Thanks.

Re:lies

[Ozan]

His final words were: "It is all in the way you work. Changing your routine is not easy at first, but after a month, I have adjusted completely. I am removing Windows from my computer!"
I think this Quote is still from the 10th day of evaluation and he just wanted to say "after a month, I will have adjusted completely".

Re:lies

[Daengbo]

It's funny: I'm not sure whether I agree with you or not about the credibility of the article, but (almost) all of the responses to your comment remind me of a Biblical debate. "Well, when Paul misquotes Isaiah, maybe what he meant was...." Because we all know he couldn't just be wrong. Anyway, when I read the first paragraph, I didn't take it as reality, because I could see the Linux evangelist at work ( and slow on the flamefests, because I use EXCLUSIVELY Linux) quoting what no one in their right mind would say: "Hey, I just switched, and I don't miss anything from Windows at all."

Re:lies

[ruszka]

One problem with understanding things over the internet, is that you're not always clear on what the other person is saying, or emphasising on.. Here's the partial quote again:

"I am removing Windows from my computer!"

Look at it this way.. Here's a guy that was so used to Windows, thinking he couldn't possibly find any other OS beneficial..and then after using Linux, he realised he could. The quote could very well mean that he was making an exclamation.. Yes, he had already removed Windows from his computer, but he was just now absorbing what that meant, that he COULD do just as well with another OS.. Get my meaning?

Re:lies

[psaltes]

This is a pretty stupid attitude. Instead of looking for reasons why the article is awful, perhaps you could think for a second, and consider the fact that non-native speakers of english quite consistantly mix up tense, in precisely the way that occured in this article. In fact, until seeing your trollish post, I didn't even give any thought that it could be something else. I really doubt it's some sort of conspiracy to defraud the /. public.

Re:lies

[sphealey]

There's no such rule of thumb. If there is, please, produce some evidence. Thanks.

Do a quick Google on 'habit "21 times"' and you will find hundreds of references. Although this guy disagrees pretty strongly, too: http://www.ishn.com/CDA/Article_Information/Behavi oralSafetyItem/0,3563,1574,00.html

By the way, when sharply questioning another's facts or judgement, it is perhaps better not to post as Anonymous Coward, eh?

sPh

Step aside, phonics game...

[Cheetah86]

Phonics game, step aside. Theres a new penguin in town.

Choose freely!!

[GdoL]

Good Idea!

Evolution trieves on diversity and the best way to choose is to know that there are a lot of distros, much of them so good that is very hard to choose one.

I choose based on the great Icons of Mandrake ;-), but still want to experiment others.
Some are better for their performancd on server others for the desktop others because...

Hey, you can choose! And don't pay an extra for that (don't pay at all)!!

Core business?

[saintlupus]

The article says that Red Hat managed to avoid the hype of the dot-com gold rush and build a normal business instead.

Forgive my ignorance of Linux history, but I thought they were on a buying spree much like VA Ice Cream (or whatever they are these days.) Anyone know?

--saint

Re:Core business?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, I won't.
Sure, one or two people.

Re:Problem

[pigeonhed]

If this you really want to learn a good place to start is www.linuxnewbie.org

When I started I found the site to not only have easy to read information but also a nice structure for just beginning.

As to your question mounting the drives is a software based situation. The actual location of the drives is not relavant. Please go to linuxnewbie.org and read for yourself it will be fun and helpful at the same time.

Well and good

[Anonymous Coward]

Once upon a time, I seriously considered switching to Linux. I was running Windoze 98, and of course, as per tradition, it went down on me more often than a five-dollar whore.

So I dutifully obtained SuSE 6.4, and installed Linux. To my dismay, it didn't much like my VidCard, and liked my monitor even less. I spent about 5 hours messing with proprietary SuSE monitor configuration tools, and typing 'startx' to the tune of lots of incomprehensible error messages.

No help in the manuals, of course. I eventually got it working, only to realize that the only functional video player that came with the distro was shareware and required $$ and registration. And that I was somehow supposed to go online and find another, despite the fact that I had no clue how to get my modem configured.

Cut to me installing OpenBSD off a boot floppy: detects netcard, autoconfigures using DHCP, offers me a list of download FTPs, and rips through the downloads, and installs. Crashing only once, while formatting my hard drive (so much for stability). It then proceeded to reboot once I typed 'reboot,' and plopped me back to a nice "#" prompt. Typing startx got me cryptic messages about ports and installing packages that were really already installed. Much fun. Never did get X working there...

But now that I'm running Windows 2000, what incentive do I have to switch? It's stable, fast (mmm, 1 gig ram + 1.4 Tbird means no waiting!), and plays ALL of my pr0n. And my incentive to switch to a system where I spend most of my time wondering why I'm using ext3 and not ReiserFS or XFS would be?

Re:Well and good

[Anonymous Coward]

No. Users like you (who don't really have a great knowledge of computers or aren't willing to learn) don't need Linux. If you just do things like play games, look at porn and surf the web, there's no real reason to use Linux. Not that you couldn't use Linux for lots of desktop stuff (I do, KDE rules), but YOU have no reason to, obviously.

Re:Well and good

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahh, the old superiority argument. I see now why, as much as Linux might be a good idea, it will never spread to the desktop: too many overblown egos like yours. :)

I was using computers back in the days of DOS 5 and Windoze 3, and have learned what is useful to me, whereever it might be from (Perl, for example?)

However, the fact remains that Linux has no killer app for the home user. Too bad.

Re:Well and good

[Anonymous Coward]

Please don't switch to linux ever again. windows was made for dipshits like you.
kthxbye

Re:Well and good

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, well, fuck you too, you self-inflated asshole. Go suck on your pet goat's shriveled dick some more, won't you? There's a good manwhore.

Re:Well and good

[Anonymous Coward]

"Too bad."

Too bad for who? What the fuck do I care if you run Linux? I know perfectly well there are people in this world who can't wipe their own butt and windows is perfect for them.

Again I don't give a shit what you use I give a shit what I use. What do you think this is some fucking game? I bet you are still in junior high. When I was in junior high all the kids used to argue about Chevy or Ford as if peldging allegience to a corporation was some sort of a noble cause. I guess these days it's microsoft. Either you are in junior high or you still have the same mentality. You really think Bill gates gives a shit about you?

Re:Well and good

[Anonymous Coward]

Hahahah. That happened to me :) also back in 1996. The "thing" installed and worked resonably well. Of course i couldn't possible know what the heck was really going on (there was no Internet beyond email in my country then).

This year i reinstalled it on my Laptop and while is still have 1.4 gb for Windows, i rarely boot it (mostly when i need to read MS Word documents my boss handles me).

>And my incentive to switch to a system where I
>spend most of my time wondering why I'm using ext3
>and not ReiserFS or XFS would be?

That's true. I wonder myself the same and reach the conslusion that you have to like technology. And that comes with a bonus because when you really know what is happening you can protect yourself and do cool things you didn't think where posible.

Re:Well and good

[Anonymous Coward]

And you're in? Elementary school? Your maturity is really showing through, dear. Amusing to see you get so pi$$ed. Weren't you the one who said you didn't want to be trolled? :)

Re:Problem

[Cheetah86]

I'd have to agree with this. Their article on compiling the linux kernel is what helped me compile it for the first time. There are some other newbie sites like linuxnewbies.org (newbies is plural) but linuxnewbie.org is still the best.

More

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh yes, and more: no explanations about political correctness and supporting the evil empire, please. I pirate all of my software like a good little dipshit script k1ddi3, so M$ isn't getting any of my money.

Besides, if I ever upgrade to XP, it'll be a pirate of the corporate edition that has activation ripped out. So much for privacy concerns...

Re:More

[NDPTAL85]

How about you switch to Linux or BSD if you want to, and you stick to what you already have if you don't? There's nothing to prove either way so quit trying to bait us into arguing with you.

Re:More

[smunt]

Try to understand that by installing a pirated version of windows, you are actualy helping them. Only using it is enough. Think 'advocacy' and 'suggesting standards'.

And ofcourse, you lose freedom, safety and your mood.

Re:More

[Malcontent]

So you are thief too.
Nice.

Forget distributions

[smnolde]

Go with FreeBSD and you'll never have to worry about which distro you use.

* Dependencies are handled automagically
* you can update the entire source tree with cvsup
* the ports collection can't be beat by any distro
* the firewalls are easy to configure and set up
* IPSEC VPNs with racoon (in ports) works great
* Setting Securelevel will protect you in ways you haven't thought of yet in linux
* There is so much more automation in FreeBSD that makes it much friendlier to use than any linux distro

Once you use FreeBSD you'll never go back to linux again.

Re:Forget distributions

[hattig]

Heh. I use FreeBSD, but I am doing Linux again now. I don't know why - I think it is because the 4.x releases just don't have the same feel as the 3.x releases.

Still use FreeBSD on the server though. Wouldn't use anything else.

Oh. Java support. I like to tinker a lot in Java, so FreeBSDs abysmal support for it means that it gets overlooked in favour of Linux for my desktop. I use Mandrake Linux 8.1 at the moment, which is pretty good overall.

Re:Forget distributions

[dinivin]

If I could get hardware accelerated 3D, as well as high quality video recording, working under FreeBSD, I'd switch. Till then, I won't be making that switch.

Dinivin

Re:Forget distributions

[entrox]

Yes, FreeBSD is a very nice OS and I'm using it right now, BUT it isn't THAT much better.

Let me explain: I've been using Debian Linux for 3 years now and got fed up by constant instabilities in the linux kernel (VM) and the package chaos. At the end I had like 150 packages installed, half of them being some obscure library on which some obscure package I needed depended. It worked, but it wasn't nice. So I gave FreeBSD a try. My Friend is a FreeBSD advocate (or should that be zealot) and he finally convinced me of FreeBSD. I backed up some data, wiped the discs and installed. It worked and after some adjustments I was feeling right at home.

BUT...

Many features that are advocated by advocates (or zealots..) weren't relevant to me or just plainly don't work.

- XFree86 DRI support doesn't work if you don't install X11 CVS. So no ports for this.

- Sound (emu10k) would often not work, needing a few reboots (mind you.. this never happened with Linux, so it shouldn't be a hardware issue).

- Ports would often not fetch or build, because they depend on some other port with a specific version, which in turn isn't available anymore.

- Securelevels are nice, but as soon as you rise em one above the lowest you cannot start X anymore, so this gets ruled out for workstations.

- CVSupping the source is nice, but what for? I got the same with apt-get upgrade and it finished faster.

- Compiling from source is nice, but I didn't see any improvements over binary packages.

I could go on for a while now..

Bottom line is: FreeBSD is a nice OS and I like it, but it isn't that great compared to e.g. Debian. Both have their shortcomings and had I known about them beforehand, I might have not switched.

I'm writing this to contrast the "FreeBSD is soooo much superior to Linux"-posters and give people a little less biased picture from my experience with BSD.

Re:Forget distributions

[Ikari Gendo]

Abysmal support? At best, I tinker too, but I've never had an issue with the native JDK1.3.1 for FreeBSD. It runs Forte, Limewire, etc. pretty well (can't vouch for more serious apps). One issue is that there is no native plugin for Mozilla. Maybe that's your beef? If so, I heartily agree.

Re:Forget distributions

[bconway]

* the ports collection can't be beat by any distro

Actually, it can very easily be beat by many distros. Ports is nice if you're installing a program from scratch and leaving it, but if you update your ports collection, there's no method to update a single package! You need to uninstall every package that depends on the one you're trying to upgrade by hand, then install all of them AGAIN through ports. Until there's a 'make update' that updates a single package (or a package and everything that depends on it) after updating the ports tree, it won't be nearly as flexible as a simple 'rpm -Fvh file.rpm' or the apt-get equivalent.

Re:Forget distributions

[smnolde]

man portupgrade

This utility rocks for upgrading ALL the installed ports.

Re:Forget distributions

[pbryan]

Go with FreeBSD and you'll never have to worry about which distro you use.

Ahem, isn't FreeBSD a distribution based on BSD?

Re:Forget distributions

[Ikari Gendo]

Ports is nice if you're installing a program from scratch and leaving it, but if you update your ports collection, there's no method to update a single package! You need to uninstall every package that depends on the one you're trying to upgrade by hand, then install all of them AGAIN through ports.

I used to think this, too, but apparently within the past couple of years it has become completely untrue. There is a really nifty utility for FreeBSD called portupgrade which does exactly what you're complaining about. Usage is "portupgrade [portname]". It settles dependencies, yadda, yadda, yadda. The biggest issue I had when trying it out was my earlier brain-dead upgrading of ports had left my package database inconsistent. Luckily there are utilities that help you fix that too.

Re:Forget distributions

[Ikari Gendo]

Ahem, isn't FreeBSD a distribution based on BSD?

Not really, since in general Linux distributions use a more-or-less unmodified Linux kernel. There is no working "BSD" kernel, and even if there were, the FreeBSD project's kernel will naturally be radically different from it, since BSD ran on now-defunct hardware. In short, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and FreeBSD are not "distributions" of BSD since they all write their own kernels and their own userlands to make use of these kernels. They are all decidely "BSD-ish," but we don't call Ultrix a distribution of SysV, do we?

Re:Forget distributions

[cymen]

I don't think it is worth using FreeBSD without using the cvsup and compiling stuff instead of using packages. Of course compiling all this stuff for a desktop system takes a lot of time. I think FreeBSD rocks for servers but if you are going to use it on your desktop be prepared for lengthy compiles (mozilla, xfree86, etc). I haven't tried using it on my desktop yet (I use Debian unstable at the moment) but I'm planning on trying it soon. I know FreeBSD has packages but they just aren't the same...

Also your problem with the port files not existing on archives is that your ports was not up to date. You need to update it using cvsup (the only package I have installed on my system, haven't compiled it yet).

Re:Forget distributions

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh yeah... too bad that *BSD (I tried out all the variants out there) simply doesn't work on my laptop . Linux does. BSD sucks. *You* suck.

Silly moron.

Re:Forget distributions

[cymen]

Here is a step by step on cvsup'ing ports:

- copy /usr/share/examples/cvsup/ports-supfile to somewhere nice (I put it in /etc)
- edit ports-supfile with a valid cvsup host (I use cvsup11.freebsd.org), choose what you want, I got rid of all the foreign language and desktop stuff but you could just do ports-all
- cvsup -s -z /etc/ports-supfile

Check out portupgrade for a nice handy tool and consider updating your system with stable-supfile and the kernel & world builds.

Re:Forget distributions

[entrox]

Well, from former experiences with debian this was the FIRST thing I did. I wrote a supfile, added it to /etc/make.conf and ran 'make update', but this problem remained for about 3 weeks and was resolved only recently. I wanted to compile WindowMaker 0.70.0 and it depends on gettext-0.10.38. Problem was, that not one server specified in the ports Makefile had this file (they all were at 0.10.39 as this is a development version).

Further I didn't mean to say anything against cvsup or ports as I'm using them and I am happy. I just wanted to point out, that they aren't flawless and have problems from time to time just like their package equivalents in Linux distros.

I guess I'm just fed up with people, who tell you about the superiority of FreeBSD, but never admit any problems it may have.

Re: Forget distributions

[SolarFlux]

I think it all depends on what you want to do, in regards to what type of UNIX or pseudo-UNIX (linux) you want to use. If you need support for all the latest hardware and oddball stuff, linux is your best bet. If you want to play games, linux is your best bet, although I know several people that successfully run games on FreeBSD, albeit in linux-compat mode.

I still haven't been able to get my Voodoo 5 working under X, except in 640x480x8bbp (yuck), but I think that's more of an issue with XF86Free...

I used all the major versions of linux at one point, and certain things didn't work with each distro (I'll not go into detail here). I ended up with Libranet (Debian) and I was pretty happy with it until I tried to upgrade Netscape one day with apt-get and it totally hosed my system.

That's when I decided to go with BSD. I installed OpenBSD as a desktop and ran it for many months with nary an issue, I even upgraded it and got X 4.x.x running without too much trouble (although it did seem like a PITA at the time). The only reason I quit running OpenBSD as a desktop was because of not enough software in ports.

I've run several FreeBSD machines and, compared to linux, they're a dream to install, configure and maintain. I also run a few NetBSD machines, which I enjoy because it's a bit more challenging to get up and running, but then it's almost as easy as FreeBSD to maintain.

I really hated compiling new kernels in linux; it's too easy with *BSD. I found Slackware (BSD-lite as I like to call it) and Debian to be good primers for *BSD, so I don't totally discount linux; it's a good learning experience.

However, I won't go back to linux as my main operating system. Ever. *BSD is that good. Sure, I may not be able to play games, but I have plenty of other stuff to keep me busy, like studying for various certifications (Solaris, HP-UX, Cisco) and playing with old Sun, HP and Cisco hardware...

entrox: sounds like you need to cvsup those ports, buddy! ;)

Re:Forget distributions

[cymen]

Good points. I wasn't sure if you had cvsup'ed it so I thought I'd point it out. I too had a problem with ports - when I wanted to make the port for portupgrade it would die because the ruby port had some sort of problem. It took a week or so until it worked so I agree that this system isn't faultless but I don't think any are. Basically I'm interested in the least amount of maintenance for a server and so far FreeBSD seems to be it (not counting OpenBSD/NetBSD)...

Re:Forget distributions

[myst-fbsd]

It looks as if you were depending on your zealot friend to help you out and either he didn't know the answers to your questions.. or you just didn't look for them.

With respect to you "3 years debian" time, I'm sure you ran into many problems with debian, unless you just ran the -stable branch which is severly outdated. I'm sorry that your time with FreeBSD was not as easy as apt-get, I'm sorry that you might have to try new things, and _read_ documentaion to make things work. Insted of using some ncurses based app to load the modules for your soundcard.

If DRI and sound are your most important needs and stablility, consistancy, reliabilty, and security are of no value.. then yes go back to debian, please ;)

Also if you were having trouble with the ports.. your zealot friend may not have been all what you thought he was.. or again you didn't want to read about them, and how to keep them up-to-date.

In debian you can't install apps from other branches.. so if you want the latest ( when ever they get around to porting it ) apps. You _need_ to run unstable.. (again stability not being what your looking for in an OS..) this would work fine for your needs.

"I could go on for a while now..." Insted of finding things that aren't the same as what you know.. feel free to read up on these things, and broaden your knowledge. It may be hard to fathom.. but your problems aren't problems at all.. just things you don't understand and didn't bother to look for answers to.

Do you really think your the only one that has ever had a "problem" or "confusion" about what you said? Welcome to the technical age where you are not alone and unique in your problems ;)

And "FreeBSD is soooo much superior to linux.." because it's consistant. It's not dependent on the current flavor of the insecure linux kernel you happen to be running. Don't forget the whole linux thing is just a kernel with apps; and FreeBSD is a complete OS.

"People that hate Windows; run Linux. People that love Unix; run FreeBSD."

Re:Forget distributions

[smnolde]

I guess you never read your /etc/defaults/make.conf and edited the lines:
MASTER_SITE_BACKUP?= \
ftp://ftp5.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/distfiles /${DIST_SUBDIR}/

and
MASTER_SITE_OVERRIDE?= ${MASTER_SITE_BACKUP}

This will allow you to get all your stuff from one mirror.

Re:Forget distributions

[SolarFlux]

Maybe your laptop just sucks.

Re:Forget distributions

[entrox]

Gnah,

First, He didn't help me out at all, as we meet in IRC and I managed to do all that by myself. I installed FBSD over PPPoE on my only machine, so no help there.

Second, Who said ANYTHING about me using 'some ncurses based app to load the modules'. I'm compiling the support into the kernel and it works sometimes, sometimes not. And guess what? It's always some other error message about not being able to map the device address space, or the device being busy, or the AC-97 codec not being available and some other weird things I forgot. And I didn't even TOUCH anyting, just rebooted a few times.

Third, I updated the ports and it STILL didn't work.
I wonder why you assume I'm some insecure fella who needs someone to fix a problem for him. I read documentation very well or ask on the freebsd lists if absolutely necessary. It's NOT always the new users (who uses OF COURSE uses kloadmodule and kconfiguresystem) fault when something doesn't work.

I'd say you're one of those people who constantly bash Linux and enjoy their wannabe elitism.

Re:Forget distributions

[1%warren]

Yeah, build your own :)
Linux From Scratch

I did, & it was the least buggy Linux "distro" I have ever had. Use it with checkinstall/installwatch In case you screw something up.

Re:Forget distributions

[Anonymous Coward]

So why do you have to be such an asshole?

Re:Forget distributions

[hattig]

Erm, when I say tinker, I mean that my job is a Java programmer, and threads etc just completely die badly with FreeBSD. Locks that are as long as a threads life!

Emulated JDK (IBM) is not an option, and yes, it was tested.

So (RH) Linux was chosen, and rightly so for this appliance.

Hopefully one day FreeBSD will haev a good native JDK that is as stable and reliable as whatever the latest Linux JDK is at that time. Or we will rewrite the entire thing in C, in which case we will use FreeBSD.

And evolution. If that app ever works in FreeBSD it will be a miracle. At least KMail works, as does Mozilla Mail, and both are fine (small/fast vs large/slow though).

Re:Forget distributions

[Anonymous Coward]

Oooh... how cleverly childish.

Re:Forget distributions

[sporty]

- Ports would often not fetch or build, because they depend on some other port with a specific version, which in turn isn't available anymore.

You realize this is entirely inaccurate since all files needed for compiling are also stored on ftp.freebsd.org, right?

-s

Re:Forget distributions

[Mad Marlin]

XFree86 DRI support doesn't work if you don't install X11 CVS. So no ports for this.

I must admit I am rather unfamiliar with this, but according to XFree86.org, ``Support for other operating systems, such as FreeBSD, is underway''.

Sound (emu10k) would often not work, needing a few reboots (mind you.. this never happened with Linux, so it shouldn't be a hardware issue).

I think I know what you are talking about. My machine (which runs FreeBSD only, and has for quite some time) will occasionally just play loud random noise instead of music. So far it has only happened a few times, and rebooting fixes it, which is very odd for something that isn't Windows. Could somebody point me in the direction of more information on this?

Ports would often not fetch or build, because they depend on some other port with a specific version, which in turn isn't available anymore.

Now that one is incredibly easy to fix, just modify the Makefile, and I have only run in to this about 5 or 6 times anyway, not often by any means of the word, and I have installed nearly everything in the ports tree (need to get a new hard drive soon because of it).

Securelevels are nice, but as soon as you rise em one above the lowest you cannot start X anymore, so this gets ruled out for workstations.

A lot of FreeBSD machines are not workstations. However, a few more levels where X is usable might be nice, that I will agree with.

CVSupping the source is nice, but what for? I got the same with apt-get upgrade and it finished faster.

I don't even know how long it takes, because I just have it run as a cron job weekly, so that I don't even need to deal with it. I don't see how that would be a real issue.

Compiling from source is nice, but I didn't see any improvements over binary packages.

You can download binary packages for FreeBSD as well as the source ports. See this page in The FreeBSD Handbook for a good explanation of the differences between packages and ports.

Re:Forget distributions

[RelliK]

In debian you can't install apps from other branches.. so if you want the latest ( when ever they get around to porting it ) apps. You _need_ to run unstable..

False. This is an outdated information. You can now select which branch you want to install a package from.

And "FreeBSD is soooo much superior to linux.." because it's consistant. It's not dependent on the current flavor of the insecure linux kernel you happen to be running.

Uh-huh. And FreeBSD never gets security holes? Why, the guy who discovered the recent security hole in Linux kernel said specifically that it's exactly the same hole that was previously found in *BSD.

Don't forget the whole linux thing is just a kernel with apps; and FreeBSD is a complete OS.

Riiight.... And BSD is not "just a kernel with apps". Are you telling me that FreeBSD team wrote every single package that comes with the base install of FreeBSD?

I tried FreeBSD myself too, and I share the same sentiment. It's a nice OS, but it's not the end-all be-all that *BSD zealots make it out to be. And it is the *BSD zealots who actually ruin it. When I asked for help I was met with the same elitism that you have just demonstrated. Just like the poster above, I didn't see a significant advantage over Debian (though, of course, it's way better than RedHat/Mandrake/etc.) And the elitism demostrated by the FreeBSD zealots made me wish I never installed it in the first place. I'll probably give it a try again at some point but not in the near future.

Re:Forget distributions

[Afrosheen]

From what I've read, BSD is dying. Don't mean to troll you BSD lovers/users/coders, but it seems that it's harder to get support for BSD than it is for linux.

Re:Forget distributions

[entrox]

Please note that I don't see compiling from source etc. an issue. And yes, I know about the binary packages.I'm just stating that I don't see any SIGNIFICANT advantage over binary packages, as some people _always_ bring that up when something about linux packages or distros gets posted.

Re:Forget distributions

[Anonymous Coward]

If you think the FreeBSD zealots are bad, try talking to the OpenBSD zealots. I've never been laughed out of an IRC channel for asking about something as simple as killall...

Re: Forget distributions

[Mad Marlin]

... I found Slackware (BSD-lite as I like to call it) and ...

Actually, FreeBSD was based on BSD 4.4-lite, so calling Slackware ``BSD-lite'' could be a little bit confusing to some people.

Re:Forget distributions

[Anonymous Coward]

False. This is an outdated information. You can now select which branch you want to install a package from.

You are talking about backporting, etc, using _source_ packages aren't you? If you nab a binary package from another branch, then you will break your system. Period. It might not appear broken but it definetly will be somewhere.

It is safe, however, to build deb sources from other branches.

Re:Forget distributions

[drsquare]

Yes, you don't have to worry, as you don't get a choice. With Linux, you can either choose a BSD-like distro, or a Windows-like distro, or something completely different. No "one size fits all" philosophy as with Windows or BSD

Re:Forget distributions

[derF024]

You are talking about backporting, etc, using _source_ packages aren't you? If you nab a binary package from another branch, then you will break your system. Period. It might not appear broken but it definetly will be somewhere.

not quite. you just cp /etc/apt/sources.list.unstable to /etc/apt/sources.list, install the app and all it's dependencies from that branch, and then cp /etc/apt/sources.list.stable to /etc/apt/sources.list everything will work as expected.

freebsd's package system in the most recent build (4.4 ?)is also horribly broken (in the words of a friend of mine who is a freebsd comitter). it took it over 2 hours to install the gnome packages alone because of the broken dependency checking. this system somehow made it into a shipping build.

Re:Forget distributions

[IkeTo]

You are talking about backporting, etc, using _source_ packages aren't you?

I'm not the poster, so I don't know what he is talking about. But that is possible, and not that difficult. Debian apt uses a file /etc/apt/sources.list to get the sources of the distributions used, and /etc/apt/preferences to store which distribution is preferred to which for each package. So you can add lines to /etc/apt/sources.list to get the unstable or testing list, and then modify /etc/apt/preferences to tell that the stable branch is preferred. See apt_preferences(5) for information.

It's actually funnier than that: apt prefer upgrading than downgrading, so you can configure your system to track stable for most packages, unless you specifically install the unstable version, and for these packages it tracks unstable. Which is exactly what I do with one of my servers: apt and mozilla tracks unstable, everything else tracks stable.

Re:Forget distributions

[Anonymous Coward]

Theres yet another niche for linux, hardware that sucks. In your face bsd zealot!

Re:Forget distributions

[thallgren]

pkg_add -r pkgname will do what you want. It fetches the package, installs it, dito for all dependencies.

Regards, Tommy

Re: Forget distributions

[koekepeer]

offtopic:you're warned

what's the troube with your voodooo5? i'm now using it at 1152xwhatever 16bpp, no problem. it's slow at q3a though, maybe you're referring to that?

regards

meneer de koekepeer

Variety is the spice of life?

[imrdkl]

I'm not sure this applies to the average person who is attempting to decide which Linux to install and use, but it's interesting to see a few of them evaluated from a dummied-down perspective. I guess a few of these may be on their way out as viable commercial alternatives, but from the response we saw on Slackware's demise (not), there seems to be no lack of friendly competition and enticements.

WHAT?!?!?!

[Mr. Piccolo]

Slackware has a logo??!

As a one-time Slackware user, I can assure you that having a logo goes against everything that Slackware stands for. It must be a fake!

Re:WHAT?!?!?!

[Proteus Child]

Slackware has a logo??!

Of course it has a logo..

darkstar login:

How is the LSB progressing?

[10Ghz]

Partly off-topic I guess but...

What's the situation with Linux Standards Base? Is any of the distros 100% compatible? Having a single standard would make life whole lot easier for users and for companies. For example: NVIDIA offers Linux-drivers for their cards. In their download-page there are packages for just about every major distro there is. It causes extra hassle for them. And I guess the situation is more or less similar for other companies as well.

How long will it be untill we start to see software that is not offered in several packages (for each distro), but in one package with instructions "this package will install on a LSB-compliant distribution"?

Re:How is the LSB progressing?

[Skuld-Chan]

Well to a certian extent yes - Debian does support RPM files (not out of the default install) and so do many other distros.

Re:How is the LSB progressing?

[Jagasian]

Well, considering that the LSB is commonly, yet jokingly referred to as the RSB (Redhat Standards Base)... I would have to say that LSB isn't doing too well. I mean, why don't they just cut to the chase and have the LSB state that "anything Redhat does is the standard"? Are we to go from one corporation controlling our standards (MS) to another (Redhat)?

Re:How is the LSB progressing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Standardization is a tough subject to make any clear decision on. When I first started using some of the more complex window managers that are now available (KDE and the like), my first thought was "wouldn't it be nice if this was standardized?" It can get quite irritating to be able to copy and paste into some windows and not others, after all, and it'd be nice to be able to install one window manager and use -all- the programs out there. But at the same time, standardization, as you've mentioned, implies that -someone- has to be the one making said standards. In this case I'm glad that Linux is somewhat fragmented in that respect, as it allows for completely fair competition; the best out there will win, and even if you don't like the winner you're still within your full right to stick with the choice you like.

Re:How is the LSB progressing?

[Anthony Boyd]

What's the situation with Linux Standards Base? Is any of the distros 100% compatible?

Well, I won't guarantee 100% compatibility, but I will say that after installing the new SuSE 7.3, I noticed the filesystem had been revamped. There were some readme files in places where I was looking for things, so I read through them, and each said the same thing: "these files are now found in /etc/foo (or wherever), for LSB compatibility."

The outside of the SuSE box also says "LSB compatibility" but I don't know if that's 100%. In any case, at least one distro is trying.

Yet another article... and some Debian corrections

[mindstrm]

SID does not mean 'Still In Development'.

Sid is a character from toy story... the boy next door who destroyed toys.

SID is the name given to the 'testing' distribution.. which is NOT necessarily the 'next' version.

From the FAQ: "It is a special distribution for architectures which haven't yet been released for the first time"

continually upgrading and dumbing down

[wwwrench]

I've been running Mandrake for some time (with no
Winblowz partition), and while I initially loved
it, I am starting to get a bit frustrated by the
fact that it is rather hard to upgrade a particular piece of the distribution (say KDE, XFree, or whatever), without upgrading the entire
distribution. It seems that each new version
uses a completely different compiler, and every program is patched like crazy, so that rpm's for
one version of the distribution, don't work for
another.

You could of course, upgrade a particular piece
of software by compiling from source, but often
I find that this results in craziness because the
distribution has done some non-standard things.

It also seems that Redhat is falling into this
behaviour, but would be interested in other people's experience. I kinda wish they would just go slower, and use more standard compilers
and stop extra-patching every program.

I dunno, maybe I don't know what I'm talking about, but I think you should just need to
install a distro once, and then from then on,
you should be able to do kernel upgrades, etc.
(when you really need to)
without having to upgrade the whole distro.

I'm not saying you can't do this, but it seems
that it is becoming harder and harder to do.

I also find that Mandrake is getting a bit too Windowz-esque. I don't mind it if they dumb things down and automate certain configurations,
as long as they still leave room for people to hack and configure things themselves.

But sometimes I find that Mandrake makes it hard to do the configuration manually. Their
crazy menuing system was one example. And their
kernel (at least in 7.0) did not even automatically come with
the original .config file).

Re:continually upgrading and dumbing down

[cymen]

I dunno, maybe I don't know what I'm talking about, but I think you should just need to install a distro once, and then from then on, you should be able to do kernel upgrades, etc. (when you really need to) without having to upgrade the whole distro.

Debian is very close to this. Unfortunately the extremely slow release schedule is a major annoyance with Debian. If you run testing or unstable on your desktop machine you should be happy with relatively recent versions of everything. If you run stable you'll find rather old versions of everything patched to hell. Maybe I'm just disillusioned but Debian just doesn't cut it for a server OS. I love the ease of upgrading but using Apache 1.2.9 and similarly outdated releases of mysql, postgresql, and php4 is a major annoyance. I could build the packages myself but there goes the whole ease of use... So for my desktops and non-production servers I run Debian unstable or testing but on my production servers I'm planning on moving 100% to FreeBSD. I don't think any Linux distribution has the ease of use and updating while using up to date software that FreeBSD has with the ports system. Some people were working on copying the FreeBSD system while using the Linux kernel (it was a debian group) but I don't think they are very active...

Ports + CVS update + linux kernel would be awesome...

Re:continually upgrading and dumbing down

[Anonymous Coward]

I have installed source dists of apache, mysql, php4, and the 2.2.19 kernel on debian potato a couple of times and it is pretty easy. I didn't run into any dependency problems.

Re:continually upgrading and dumbing down

[brinksterz]

Linux Suse since version 3.1 I think Just got the newer 7.3 and used the Yast2 update, took my computer Down :O( Spend 4 hours messing around and decided on a complete new install, worked absolute perfect after that :O) Oh yes I wasnt the only person this happened to, thank god I actually thought I had done wrong. http://www.roaringpenguins.com has a great right up about this and other problems. Still never thought about going back to wondowz though, not even when the PC was down, yes Linux updates are a biatch, but worth it once running :O)

Re:continually upgrading and dumbing down

[unapersson]

I'd begun to start thinking that as well, but I recently switched to using apt to update my version of Mandrake and it is now a lot easier. After a little pain initially (due to a few duplicate packages in my rpm databae) which I had to fix using:

apt-get -f upgrade

and:

apt-get -f dist-upgrade

It's now working fine and I'm very happy with it. I can still use RPM if I want to, but for the most part apt-get is far easier.

Just download the apt rpm and give it a go. It's easy to swap back to just using rpm if you don't like it. The initial pain to get a clean rpm database it is well worth the effort.

I'm on a slow connection so don't download everything, just the individual packages I want to upgrade (because of bugfixes or whatever). If it works okay I just leave it.

Re:continually upgrading and dumbing down

[cymen]

What versions of the software are in the source dists? By source dists I presume you mean deb source code packages, not tar.gz, right? I wasn't aware that there were source dists for the latest versions of software - if so, why do the binary packages lag behind?

A newbie's point of view

[BigBir3d]

I sure wish that sites like this were around a couple of years ago...

I have used Linux off and on for about 2 yrs now, first dual-booting, then just Linux, then just Windows, and now back to Linux again.

My roommate is a big Red Hat guy, and that is what I used before, RH 6.0-7.1. Now that I am interested in Linux, but suedo capable of doing some things without help, I have switched. I am now using Linux Mandrake 8.1. I installed it myself, botched it up somehow the first time, re-did it, and have been happy since. Once I get Q3A working, I will be exstatic!

Through all of this, the effort has been worth it, although, of course, it is now much easier to get going on your own without the help of a guru!

No, no no.

[astyanax]

Sid is unstable, woody is testing. Sid will always be unstable, and never be released. New testing branches will be released as the previous one stabilizes. I have to agree I didn't think sid stood for anything, but it's certainly a nice backronym =)

Re:No, no no.

[crisco]

Once Woody becomes the stable, official latest version of Debian, won't Sid move to testing and a new nickname for unstable be agreed upon?

I was under the impression that the labels stable, testing and unstable referred to three different current stages of the Debian release cycle, while the labels Potato, Woody, and Sid referred to specific targeted releases.

Re:No, no no.

[klieber]

Sorry -- you're wrong. Sid will *always* be unstable (at least until they run out of Toy Story names) Check debian.org for an explanation.

http://www.debian.org/doc/FAQ/ch-ftparchives.html# s-sid

Re:No, no no.

[crisco]

OK, I was partly wrong.

http://www.debian.org/doc/FAQ/ch-ftparchives.html# s-codenames explains it a litle better, Sid is always unstable but the other names stick to a specific release of Debian.

Free clue

[Rev. Null]

Often people say "x is gone" as a way of expressing their intention of getting rid of "x", even if they have not already done so. Sure, it's an abuse of language, but it happens.

Also, it seems to me that the author was merely reporting the words of the friend. If anyone was lying (assuming no abuse of language as described above), it would be the friend and not the author (who would be only quoting a lie).

Relax.

Re:Free clue

[Blymie]

Guys, I think you (both previous posts) really need to READ the article before you make the above comments. No, he didn't say "x is gone" as a way of expressing intent, for further in the paragraph he said (and, as I quoted.. so you aren't reading what I'm saying even) :

"No, don't worry, I deleted it voluntarily..."

Now, people don't say "x is gone" and then say "I got rid of it vountarily" to express a future intent.

Furthermore, the paragraph is written as if the entire paragraph is one phone call. Odd to say the least.

I will tell you one thing. As to "reporting".. you try to flush out things that don't jive like this, and ask the person you are interviewing for clairty. If this person interviewed his friend, and then slapped it all down on a paragraph, than his proof reading should have uncovered such strangeness.

Since it didn't, even at best his proof reading sucks, as I said before. What other things has he missed during proof reading, when such an obvious screwup makes it through? Technical mistakes? Others?

Re:Yet another article... and some Debian correcti

[ShittyGumDrops]

Actually, Sid is the name of the 'unstable' distribution.

Woody is the 'testing' distribution.

ACK!

[Anonymous Coward]

I think its time for a new website design. That site is very hard to follow. There are large white spaces in bewteen the top menus and the reviews. The file lists scroll all the way over to the right. (Running at 1024x768)

Although I think its intresting, its a headache to look at.

What's wrong with Rocky Road?

[Anonymous Coward]

I took a look at the local ice cream parlor, and quite frankly, I'm overwhelmed by the number of choices. I started eating ice cream quite recently, and if I'd known there were this many different flavors, I probably would have stayed away.

When I started eating ice cream, I vaguely knew there were other flavors besides rocky road; but I knew that rocky road was the biggest, oldest, most successful ice cream. So, why would anyone want to eat any of the other flavors? Do they seriously rival rocky road in terms of tastiness and coldness. Do they have rocky road peanut type innovation? Does anyone eat them besides the people that make them as vanity projects?

If any of the other flavors do have advantages over Rocky Road (which I kind of doubt), then I may have to reconsider my eating of ice cream. I mean, if I can't get all the benefits of ice cream in one flavor, what's the point? I might as well switch to water.

Re:What's wrong with Rocky Road?

[Anonymous Coward]

What's even sweeter than the ice cream, is what you put on top of it. It's sad that so many of the really interesting toppings are only available on lousy Mushysoft ice kreem.

Re:What's wrong with Rocky Road?

[crucini]

Except it's not water, exactly:

Debating unix flavors in the context of anything Microsoft is like talking about which ice cream flavor tastes least like sawdust with turpentine sauce.

--void in a.s.r

Re:What's wrong with Rocky Road?

[Malcontent]

The problem is that XP is not really an operating system. It's a vehicle designed to get people signed up with passport. It is also a medium to deliver windows users advertising. It's also a vehicle for media comapnies to erase unlicenced images, sounds and videos from your computer. That winXP also acts as an operating system is entirely coincedental. It's primary mission is to sell other MS products, sell advertsing and make money for partners of MS and of course harm MS competitiors.

It's a tarpit for suckers and fools.

Re:What's wrong with Rocky Road?

[Anonymous Coward]

Link please. %^)

Re:What's wrong with Rocky Road?

[Anonymous Coward]

dont compare linux to ice-cream
cause linux is not ice-cream
so what if linux fail to replace or dethrone windows, will u stop using it then!
is this even an issue?

RPM's are whats wrong with RH.

[NDPTAL85]

Red Hat, Mandrake and SuSe are RPM based (Red Hat Package Manager) distro's. RPM sucks. There's no other way to put it. Its awkward to have to manually remove or install a piece of software AND all of its dependencies by hand with RPM.

Thus I have moved onto Debian where package management is g00d. Learn about Debian's apt-get. And if you can actually get Debian installed, you'll be happy.

Re:RPM's are whats wrong with RH.

[Anonymous Coward]

...and then when you want really good package management, you move on to the BSDs and their ports system. This is even better and easier then Debian's apt-get.

Re:RPM's are whats wrong with RH.

[NDPTAL85]

I just installed FBSD last nite and I like what I see. So now I get to compare Debian's and FreeBSD's packaging systems side-by-side. :)

Re:RPM's are whats wrong with RH.

[joestar]

Did you try Mandrake? man urpmi

Re:RPM's are whats wrong with RH.

[NDPTAL85]

I did have Mandrake but never checked that urpmi thing out. Can it upgrade the entire distro like apt-get can?

You have at least 3 options:

[BigBir3d]

1. Use a smaller browser window.
2. Use a different browser.3. Use a bigger brain!

Helpful Information

[Traxton1]

I really thought this was a nice page. I found an old pentium lying around somewhere, and I was thinking of installing Linux on it just to test it out (hanging around Slashdot, you just have to eventually...) so I'm glad I saw this before I tried anything.

RPM based distros

[ll5]

Wow, look at his comparison charts in the package management section and you will find that a huge majority of systems are using rpm. A couple of deb, and a couple of tar.gz systems and all of the rest are rpm based. So why is that the (arguably) worst package management system ever is so predominately used? SuSE is the only company I have seen that can make it work well. Having said that, SuSE would be my main distro if they would switch to the deb format. As it is now, I will take Debian or Slack over any of the others simply for their non-use of rpms. Who knows, maybe I have spent too much time in dependancy hell.

Re:RPM based distros

[Anonymous Coward]

Marketshare.

RPM was distributed with Red Hat, and as RH had a larger userbase than most others, it got to de-facto define the packaging system most folks use. Not the best, not the easiest, just the most widely used.

w00t

[Anonymous Coward]

I have looked for a home among the four different categories of people that I have found in the Linux community. The first are old Unix people who marvel at getting their operating system for free. From a windows perspective, it is like getting a version of DOS for free, which by today's standards is software worth $1.95. O.K., the Linux kernel is better, I'll pay $3.50. These people seem to view the advent of graphical interfaces like gnome and kde as sacrilegious and prefer to live in a command line world. I am not part of this group. The second group is that of Microsoft hater. This group, caught up in some "Way the world ought to be" crusade, has interpreted Microsoft's success as something illegal or at a minimum, a conspiracy. They promote their better technology but fail to see that Microsoft has simply given the customer what the customer wants. They are quick to show that their system can handle a "multithreading three dimensional inverted umptysquat" but when the customer asks "if I click on the picture does it do what I want?" they must eventually conclude "No!" I am not part of this group. The third group are those that have turned to this Chaos called Linux to overcompensate for some inferiority in another aspect of their life. They relish the idea that they know things that others don't, even if others really don't want to have to know those things. They are experts on using the 3rd row of keys on their calculators. Yes, it is impressive that you know this, but get a life! I am not part of this group, either. The last group seems to be people that have appreciated the merits of windows and for one reason or another have decided to take a chance on Linux. This group seems to find out quickly that the costs, in terms of what you must give up, is much higher than the costs of continuing with windows, and eventually find themselves back using windows. I do not want to be part of this group.

Re:w00t

[Anonymous Coward]

thank you for sharing that, you cock-biting assmaster. now please die you piece of shit.

Re:w00t

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess you ain't part of these groups, either:

1) Sysadmins that want a couple of things like
squid, apache, sendmail etc. without having to pay
millions of $ for using them, and who want an OS for their server that has unix' well-proven stability and will not reboot every time they install, say, things like a printer or a word processor.
2) Developers that want to use the hundrends of proven tools available for linux/unix.
3) Normal people that want to have a bit more control over their desktop applications than intelli-nonsense permits them to.
4) People that like diversity and learning new stuff.

BTW:
-Linux has nothing to do with DOS. The fact that they both use command-line UIs means nothing. Comapring DOS command line to the most simple linux command-line is like comparing a pigeon to an F-16.
-I like to think of myself as a Windows power user appart from a linux user. I can assure you Microsoft products (and due to my job I've payed good money for some of them, like Dev Studio) seldom give the client what he needs. They rather tend to dictate a specific (quite silly) way of doing things (1 Microsoft Way in the beast's address is not coincidental) and create unnecesary "needs" which are, of course, fulfilled.

Re:w00t

[fferreres]

All true. But you are missing a fifth group. People that like Windows but want a more challenging OS. Linux is more challenging and it has nice features.

Certainly, i want to be in that group. That doesn't mean i'll never run Windows again if i have to. I am ok with Linux now i can replace what Windows had broken and still keep a nice GUI (gnome).

debian

[cwebster]

>At any time during the development process, there are three branches in the main directory tree - "stable", "testing" and "unstable", the last of which is often referred to as "sid" (still in development).

i guess the author of that site didnt bother to look at the names of stable and testing (potato and woody). Maybe then he would have realized that "sid", just as potato and woody, are references to toy story characters.

Re:debian

[IkeTo]

On the other hand, if I understand things correctly, the name sid is special: it is always with unstable. That is, unstable will always be called sid, and new names are given to testing rather than unstable. Which is because sid is the character in toy story which keeps breaking toys, which matches the characteristics of unstable.

Nothing's wrong with RedHat... but I prefer Debian

[damas]

You got it wrong lad. WinXP is not like a Linux distro... WinXP is an OS, a Linux distro is the OS PLUSSSS Office suites (Koffice, StarOffice/ OpenOffice, AbiWord+Gnumeric come to mind), compilers, IDEs, webservers, fileservers, nameservers, mailservers, database servers
(closed source or open source -- I just went the Debian way -- free or costing money -- with or without source code bundled on CDs -- providing various grades of phone/chat etc. support to their customers).
Since there is so much free software out there the commercial distros do the mix and match and compile stuff for you and give you phone support at a cost. Non-commercial distros are mixed and... by volunteers and don't provide the "phone and get no clear answer" support.
Of course a closed-source monopoly would be a lot more profitable. But this is mostly FREE software.

huh?

[tijnbraun]

telnet www.distrowatch.com 80
Trying 209.153.212.241...
Connected to www.distrowatch.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET / HTTP1.0

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sat, 10 Nov 2001 18:51:02 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.20 (Win32)
Last-Modified: Wed, 21 Feb 2001 23:26:56 GMT
ETag: "0-105-3a944ec0"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 261
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html

This must be the first linux related site I saw that runs NT (or 2000)

Re:huh?

[markhlfs]

If this really bothers you then use the USA mirror (distrowatch.linuxfromscratch.org). I can definately confirm that this server runs Linux (LinuxFromScratch, not surprisingly).

Mark

to my sadness, I agree

[twilight30]

Unfortunately I'm finding Mdk 8.1 to be a major pain in the arse. Things break after upgrades, to the point where the original purpose of having an easily-installed/-maintained system is totally lost.

I had used RH from 5.0 to 6.0. Eventually I got tired of the extra work needed to get the system usable (hey, I started out using Macs, I got spoiled and I do admit it) and tried out Mdk 7.0. Very loyal, until 8.1 came out. Installed it, and found my hardware would sometimes disappear for no reason, or, despite GUI-tool claims to the contrary, not have been set up properly in the first place. Kind of like Linuxconf's interminable inability to detect stuff as needed.

So I'm moving back to Debian and OpenBSD for the home clients and firewall respectively -- I had experimented with both a while ago and found them both to be pretty rigorous in their requirements. This was an obstacle before, mostly because I hadn't the time or inclination to look for all the info necessary to do the installs properly (I was lazy! :) What was that quote from the Unix-Haters' Handbook? Something like 'Linux is only free if your time is worthless.' ;)

So, paradoxically, here's where I'm at, late 2001:

• Business calls, so we're going with RH 7.2 Pro. We're going to hold them to their promises in terms of improved ease of use. Not expecting miracles, but I'm betting they'll be more stable than Mdk at this point. Using Debian or OpenBSD (for our important stuff) at this point is still beyond my abilities/confidence level, so they'll have to wait.
• On the desktop at home, Mdk 8.1 for now. Will only use 8.2 if there are dramatic improvements in bugfixes. Bearing in mind the comment below from the disenchanted Debian user, will probably shift to Debian/Woody over the next six months.
• For the home firewall, OpenBSD. Slowly but surely eliminating the need for 'easy-to-use' is going to take a while. Here I can afford to experiment; at work, I can't.

This guy is clueless?

[linuxguy]

This guy reminds my of why world domination for Linux is bad. Do we really want people like this guy using Linux?

peanut

[fz00]

i don't know how many peanut fans are out there but i'm into it bigtime. before my linux of choice was suse but i had let that copy get stale and downloading the latest is a pain because they don't organize their site like the cd. what i liked about suse is that the installation was straight-forward and it didn't install alot of garbage like redhat.

with peanut it's just format ext2 partition and untar. like ready-made linux. i love that. also, it's very complete in the sense that its a sensible base install without having to jump through hoops. if you want a quick easy in and out linux, peanut is the way to go. stampede claimed to be that way when i first tried it but it was way too buggy at the time. i don't know if they've improved. i'm sure they have.

FreeBSD is a Linux?!?

[Xtifr]

If FreeBSD is something you should consider when considering linux distros, doesn't that make it a linux distro? In some contexts, I think the answer to this question is yes. But otherwise your comment is off-topic (and probably a troll), so I assume you must also claim that the answer is yes? -evil grin-

Anyway, I prefer OpenBSD for security and Debian for more general use. I know a number of people who bounce back and forth between Debian and FreeBSD, and who consider them to be extremely close in quality (as do I). In other words, I am a counterexample - and I know several others - to your claim "you'll never go back to Linux again."

Furthermore, while I personally think that FreeBSD is (with Debian and OpenBSD) one of the three best choices, I suspect that people who prefer Mandrake over Debian are unlikely to prefer FreeBSD. Maybe Darwin or BeOS, but probably not FreeBSD.

Plan9 rules, OK? :p ;)

Gentoo Linux shows the most promise

[Jagasian]

This coming from a Debian user... Gentoo Linux's new package management system sets it apart from the others.

Unlike other distros, Gentoo Linux has an advanced package management system called Portage. Portage is a true ports system in the tradition of BSD ports, but is Python-based and sports a number of advanced features including dependencies, fine-grained package management, "fake" (OpenBSD-style) installs, safe unmerging, system profiles, virtual packages, config file management, and more.

If you have a fast cpu, lots of ram and disk space, Gentoo seems like a good fit. However, Debian's apt-get seems like the best fit for slower resource restrained systems.

I had no idea there were so many distros....

[Anonymous Coward]

I know the main players Redhat, Mandrake, Debian, Slackware, SUSE,,, but this was a suprise.

Wrong first distro.

[Inoshiro]

Incorrect.

Slackware was based on SLS, the very first ever Linux distribution. Before that, you grabbed the latest blazing 0.9whatever from Finland, then started with GCC 1.4 and other goodies from gnu.org. Spend some weeks compiling, and you could maybe boot Linux on your 386.

Re:Wrong first distro.

[Yath]

Incorrect

Don't be so quick to flash your geek creds. He said it was the oldest of the distributions listed. Hell, it wasn't even misleading.

Re:Wrong first distro.

[SealBeater]

I think he was referring to the guy who implied Yggdrasil, rogerl.

SealBeater

Re:Wrong first distro.

[Yath]

Oops... he should have quoted better :) Yeah that's it.

MooseTracks

[N8F8]

If any of the other flavors do have advantages over Rocky Road (which I kind of doubt)

Gotta love fudge swirls, caramel and tiny peanut butter cups. Yeah, peanut butter cups -innovate that.

Re:Nothing's wrong with RedHat... but I prefer Deb

[nyseal]

I think that may be the problem; the word 'free'. Didn't your grandmother ever tell that nothing in life is free? What's the expense in this case: 1. A lack of software that support MY needs; 2. Convenience (although I DO realize that most Linux users do NOT value this); 3. Support (although this may be subjective); 4. A Masters Degree in Computer Engineering just to TRY to interpret it (again; not a Linux users downfall); 5. TCO - Total Cost of Ownership; how much time will I spend just TRYING to figure out what's going on with my PC? You will probably suggest that I give up security for the price of convenience, but I'm not the 'average' PC user either. I like to stay away from pontentially dangerous situations and I also keep my AV software up to date. I know it's not the solution, but it helps. Lastly, I don't really mind which company (or individual) is running my OS as long as it works for ME. I like XP; but that's my OPINION. Now THAT'S diversity.

This is SUCH a troll, people

[Spiff28]

Too funny how many have fallen hook line and sinker. You oughta check his user info, see how many other blatant trolls this guy's posted.

Quit wasting your time.

Here's how they did it

[selectspec]

Professor Plum and Cournel Mustard deleted the partition in the library with the rope.

Bootable CD Distributions

[rangerx]

They need a placeholder for all these bootable live cdroms I keep on seeing everywhere now. They are great for quick recovery jobs, and its always handy to have a linux distro that fits in your wallet.

LBT from Linuxcare
LNX-BBC
Portable Linux Auditing CD

Small thing (for some, big for others)

[efgbr]

All you need is to get hold of the Linux kernel and perhaps two dozens of other software packages

Actually, you need some extra 60 packages, including core packages such as the C library, most of them come from the GNU project. Hence, the name GNU/Linux.

But you're free to call Linux + GNU packages + XFree86 and hundreds of others just Linux.

Debian Linux?

[efgbr]

The page mentions Debian GNU/Linux as Debian Linux. That is as wrong as calling "Red Hat Linux" "Red Hat GNU/Linux".

Btw, " perhaps the purest form of the ideals that started the Linux development." That's wrong, Linux was started in 1991 but the FSF was started in 1984. The ideals of free software existed before that, though, when all the software was free.

Re:Nothing's wrong with RedHat... but I prefer Deb

[drsquare]

Didn't your grandmother ever tell that nothing in life is free

You're right, Windows may be free, but you only get a basic, amateurish, childish OS, with very little in terms of functionality. You get what you pay for I'm afraid, and if you want stability, reliability, configurability, an enourmous selection of amazing software and a professional, well-rounded OS, you need to spend lots of money on Linux. Wait a minute, that doesn't sound right...

2. Convenience

Yes, it's conventient not having to reboot, reinstall, mess about with activation, earn money for expensive upgrades, sit in front of your computer in case an irritating dialogue box comes up asking you if you're REALLY sure you want to do what you just told it to do, go round finding things off the Internet because nearly nothing is included, have to click about 70 "next" buttons and rebooting just to install a program, have to spend ages removing spyware, trojans, viruses etc. Linux is quite convenient indeed.

4. A Masters Degree in Computer Engineering just to TRY to interpret it

You'd need one of those to interpret Window's awkward error messages. Linux on the other hand isn't so cryptic, opaque and badly documented, so it is simple to diagnose problems, or to get someone to telnet in and do it for you.

how much time will I spend just TRYING to figure out what's going on with my PC?

Yes, how much time will you spend trying to figure out what those blue screens and wierd error messages mean. Maybe it would be easier to reinstall?

I like XP; but that's my OPINION. Now THAT'S diversity.

My idea of diversity doesn't include having to ring up MS and BEG to use my own computer.

disenchanted by distributions

[mrm677]

I'm thoroughly disenchanted by Linux distributions. I used to use Redhat. When I upgraded from 6.2 to 7.0, I lost all of my custom settings. Seems that upgrade settings just don't work. So then I tried Slackware and I liked it, but many binary-releases are .rpm only. So then I tried Linux-from-Scratch. This was fun building a system and learning how it works. But I quickly tired from the high maintenance required. I'd like to try Debian, but I have a Radeon graphics card and they are still stuck at XFree86 3.x.x!!! I really wish there would be a large effort into improving the maintainability of these so called "distributions".

I hate to say it, but "Windows Update" works pretty damn good.

Re:disenchanted by distributions

[sydneyfong]

as i remember, debian testing (woody) is using XFree86 4.X already. For desktops don't use debian potato, for those packages are quite out of date, and woody with (much) newer packages is stable enough for desktops (don't be misguided by the name "testing" or "unstable"...)

It is copying that and more

[LINM]

Look out for the commercial version of Debian coming out by the Xandros guys, creators of Corel Linux. It not only combines the best of Debian and some other distros, but also delivers a package that is usable by 'normal' people (not like me on Slashdot Saturday, 11PM). Great technology combined with real usability and support.

Excellent page!

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been looking for something like this for sooooooo long!

lll l i inn nn ooo oo o o oxxx xx

[Anonymous Coward]

Lllik k kk mmm m my y y yy as s ss sss ss

moddd d d d uuu u p p p p pl zzz

Yes. here's the logo

[Anonymous Coward]

(
B======o=======D
(

The "o" is a tumor

LSB should give up

[Anonymous Coward]

LSB is just about making it easier to commercialise free software, so for that reason any distro that supports free software should ignore it.

They have 0 credibility after choosing RPM's as the packaging standard "because the market has spoken".

They should choose the packaging standard based on technical merit.. if there is no clear cut winner (as is the case) they should NOT specify a standard.

LSB is doomed to fail, they only rushed out the 1.0 version because they had been working on it for 2 or 3 years and the commercial companies that were financially supportingthem were cracking hasling them for results.
LSB wont help users in the long run... if companies want to make software available for a free OS then thats fine, show us your source.
NVIDIA can go to hell.

Re:LSB should give up

[10Ghz]

"LSB is just about making it easier to commercialise free software, so for that reason any distro that supports free software should ignore it."

Why? It would also make things easier for end users. For making sure that distros are compatible between each other is just a good thing. Of course, anyone can make a distro that has different objectives, and thus, are not LSB-compatible. Nobody is forcing anyone to follow LSB.

"They should choose the packaging standard based on technical merit.. if there is no clear cut winner (as is the case) they should NOT specify a standard."

Linus has said that LSB doesn't really set standards, rather they document what has become the de facto standard. And like it or not, rpm is the de facto standard.

"NVIDIA can go to hell"

Well, they give me the best 3D-performance in Linux. True it's bad that the drivers are not open source (for reasons that are beynd NVIDIA's control).

this may seem pathetic...

[highspeednerd]

but i have been trying to install linux distro-free from scratch for some time now. an ambitious project for me, since i have been using linux only for 3 months now (redhat, which hasn't made me completely happy). i'm a want-to-know-how-it-REALLY-works-nerd and i want to create the minimal installation without any ballast and unnecessary elements.
my growing dissatisfaction with windows was (for a large part) founded in the fact that you never really know what is going on, though you suspect your system might be doing things it shouldn't (and those rather inefficiently). that feeling has now been replaced with "my linux box is doing things i don't want it to do/i don't understand", which is admittedly an improvement already. now i want more (shame on me).

i tried "linux from scratch" and it worked, but i think the process of having to install a distro first and then creating my own on top/besides instead of from the ground up seems tedious and clumsy.

i have tried to glue the real thing together from bootdisk-howtos and related stuff, but the best i managed was kernel booting and halting because of shared libs missing.

any pointers? (except for the one reading "go to hell, flamebait")

Re:this may seem pathetic...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like your ready for Slackware.
If Slack does'nt give you what you want, then I would suggest CRUX. CRUX is built on a Slackware mold, but has a 'Build your own Linux' feel to it, and you dont need to install a distro first. The CRUX Distro will run on a CD-Rom Drive mount until you've built enough to boot from your install. Make sure to read all the help files first and you'll know if CRUX is right for you.

parsing error

[Anonymous Coward]

"perhaps the purest form of the ideals that started the Linux development" means that it was the existence of the free software ideals (as expressed by the FSF since 1984) that allowed the development of Linux to start in 1991.

You were reading it the opposite way around, as if it said "Linux development started the ideals".

File placement

[ejasons]

Do any of the distributions not place everything into /usr (i.e. in some discrete alternatve location, such as /opt)? What about not requiring root access in order to install a package that doesn't place files in "system areas"?

I find it interesting that people often complain about "DLL hell", yet we still live with unrelocatable applications in Linux. I'm also surprised that there haven't been any exploits involving tainted RPM files. By default, when an RPM is installed, it is allowed to execute pretty much any code that it wants!

I've taken to creating many of my RPMs from scratch; they can almost always be built as a non-root user, and can usually be installed as a non-root user (using an alternate RPM database), but the management of both (root and non-root) systems is a bit difficult, and it would be easier if the distribution wouldn't put thousands of files into /usr. Gnome and KDE really have no business being there...

Re:File placement

[smcv]

According to the FHS, /usr is for the distribution, /usr/local is for the local admin (you), and /opt is... er... pretty ambiguous, actually.

"Distributions may install software in /opt, but should not modify or delete software installed by the local system administrator without the assent of the local system administrator." -- the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard.

Many distros (Debian for one) don't use /opt, ever. Their rationale seems to be that if /usr/local is reserved specifically for the local admin, and the rest of /usr is available for the package maintainers to play with, then there's no ambiguity and everyone is happy.

It sounds to me as if distributions should install into /usr, but if you download (say) KDE or Gnome or StarOffice or whatever separately from your distro, then perhaps that should go in /opt - if, say, Debian doesn't have a package for a hypothetical office suite ObscureOffice, but I download a binary package in a .tar.bz2 or a Windows-style self-extracting executable or something direct from the publisher of ObscureOffice, it might be sensible for that to default to /opt.

Re:Nothing's wrong with RedHat... but I prefer Deb

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, talking of expenses...what about the time lost rebooting Windows everytime you update the configuration or install a driver? Time lost again rebooting when the system crashes? Cost of uprgrading your hardware so you can have a different windows dressing? Cost in bandwidth to the general internet when your WinXP's Raw Sockets vulnerability is used by hackers to launch DDoS attacks? (BTW, having a secure system entails a LOT more than keeping your Anti-Virus program up to date...)

But you're right, it's all a matter of opinion. I actually had Windows XP running on my machine - actually, in a VMware machine running under Linux - but I switched back to Win2k (still in VMware, I don't like rebooting), which has a smaller memory footprint.

So what I have is really the best of both worlds (and I don't have a Masters Degree in Computer Engineering - when's the last time you checked out Linux distros? They're a LOT easier to use for someone who has no experience with Linux, as was the case with me three months ago). If you want to settle for less, you're very much entitled to. Your loss.

Having your cake and eating it

[smcv]

• stablity (i.e, Debian/stable)
• the newest pacakges ALL the TIME (i.e, Debian/unstable)

I'd like both, please.

You can't have both, it just doesn't work like that. If you run new software, expect it to fall over occasionally. If you want stable software, you'll have to wait for the people who ran it when it was new software to find and report the bugs...

Come on, this is open source, it gives public beta testing a whole new meaning :-) Think of new Linux software as equivalent to what proprietary software companies' programmers are hacking away at right now, and slightly stale but very solid stuff like Debian stable, Linux kernels before 2.4, etc. as equivalent to what proprietary software companies have just released.

Having said that, Debian unstable is misnamed. stable, testing and unstable really mean "server/production quality", "it hasn't crashed for at least a fortnight * " and "it works for me". :-)

I've been running unstable for a couple of months, and the only problems I've had were a couple of Gnome apps randomly segfaulting on exit sometimes, until they were updated a week or two later (if you've used Windows you'll be used to that sort of thing, except you don't get the free upgrades), and the apt/dpkg dependencies sometimes breaking and preventing me from installing stuff (unstable is always changing so things are bound to be inconsistent sometimes; I fixed this in the end by downloading the Debianized package source for one of the packages involved and compiling my own .deb file for it. No changes needed, just recompiling on my system with my library versions fixed it).

[*: OK, I'm being over-simplistic, but no new bug reports for 2 weeks is one of the criteria for unstable packages going into testing.]

Re:Having your cake and eating it

[Rick the Red]

You can't have both, it just doesn't work like that. If you run new software, expect it to fall over occasionally. If you want stable software, you'll have to wait for the people who ran it when it was new software to find and report the bugs...

Yes, I know. However, my specific comment was about the 2.4.x kernel. How long before that is considered stable? Lots of other distros use it, why not Debian? I don't mind beta testing the occasional application, but as I said I'm running Red Hat now and I'm looking to upgrade, and I want the 2.4.x kernel. So that rules out Debian, which is too bad because other than the older kernel it's exactly what I'm looking for. So I'm going to try Mandrake, which from what I understand should indicate my willingness to be a beta tester :-)

Non-free (as in beer) somehow cheaper, sometimes

[smcv]

They're probably in the same sort of situation I was for a while. I was looking for a cheap, basic web hosting package a while ago. Ironically, the cheapest I could find that did what I wanted ran on WinNT+IIS.
I eventually switched from Win98 to Linux, so I was uploading content from a Linux desktop to a Windows server... shouldn't that be the other way round?

[While I was hosted there, my site was "upgraded" to Win2k+IIS because the NT box started returning "403 denied" to every request, and after a week of being unable to fix it they decided to give up, copy everything to their new server, and reformat the old one while they waited for the DNS to refresh... :-( ]

I'm now paying twice as much for hosting with another company on Linux+Apache, which is bad from a financial point of view, but does mean I get a decent bandwidth quota (this is why I moved), SSI, CGI scripts, admins who seem to know what they're doing (always a nice feature), and immunity to Code Red and friends...