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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.
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
> 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
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.
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.
Wax on, wax off baby!
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.
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.
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"
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.
-- The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'.
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 =)
v2sw7CUPhw5ln6pr5Pck4ma7u7LFw0m6g/l7Di5e6t5Ab6TH.
Yggdrasil. Named after the "tree of the world" from Norse mythology.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
* 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.
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
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.
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).
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.
Actually, FreeBSD was based on BSD 4.4-lite, so calling Slackware ``BSD-lite'' could be a little bit confusing to some people.
Best Slashdot comment ever
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
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"...)
Don't quote me on this.