Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying "Don't use Debian, use RedHat, dammit!!", but in the spirit of everyone at Comdex, to say, "Can't we all just get along?":)
All the distributions have their own good/bad points. And there isn't one king of the distributions that everyone should use. All too often, when someone starts up another (or tweaks an existing) distribution, everybody jumps up and yell, "We've already got 1500 distributions (or one particular dist), go home!!" Each have their targetted audience (newbie, hacker, corporate, etc) and we should respect that. If one wants to target newbies and use KDE, great, more converts from that other OS. Rather, so many jump around, wave their hands, yelling, "Use GNOME!" or "GUIs suck, go text mode!" And where do we end up? Non-Linux people (PHBs for instance), just see us as rabid flamers that can't make up our minds.
My points in the post weren't to say everything Debian is worthless at all, but many of the points the original poster made can be applied to many distributions. The packaging system certainly seems very nicely organized for the best performance. I don't know everything about it, so I asked questions. I'm more than willing to be educated on anything. What happens? "Shut up." Yeah, real good PR those sort of comments can generate. We all need to be better advocates concentrating on the pluses of programs, less on the negatives ("XYZ sucks"). Oh, and provide concrete examples for arguments to say, "XYZ should be able to do feature ABC. It should do it like this," and provide code to back it up if you can (even pseudo-algorithms help for the non-programmers).
About the RPM problem, I've heard many people having it over the years. But I myself have never ran into it. I've installed, made my own, etc thousands of RPMs. I don't claim that the problem doesn't exist, just that I haven't had any problems with the system.
What I meant about FTP installing, was during the initial install. RedHat, for instance, has the choices for FTP, NFS, SMB installation instead of just the usual hard disk or cdrom. Heck, add more options to these, you never know what someone out there may need to get Linux installed. That is our goal here, to get more people to at least give us a try. These are a few things that every distribution could greatly benefit from. I had run into trouble with this when installing Debian on a spare PC without a CDROM. Sure doing an FTP install over a 28k modem is not practical, but I have other Linux boxes on my 100bT home LAN with CDROMs that served up very nicely in the RedHat based distributions I was toying with.
In conclusion, use what's right for you and for the job, not necessarily forcing anything down others' throats. This isn't Redmond, nothing works for every situation. And be a positive advocate for Linux and Open Source, it goes a long way.
*Better package management - dependencies that work! I've never had trouble with RPM's dependencies. If it says it needs XYZ package first, ok, download and install it. But it's good to have different packagers, choice is your friend.
*apt - Upgrades your system from debians ftp site whenever you like, with next to no user interaction Isn't that one of the beefs with RedHat so many have, taking users away from the nitty-gritty? You put your trust again, in one organization that all the packages are compatible, aren't trojaned, etc. Do they have any testing or reviewing board before a package is listed on the ftp server?
*alternatives - have emacs & xemacs, multiple vi... dont just blindly use whatever Red Hat could be bothered to compile *loads more packages - apt-get will normally get and install the packages. So, there's 500 million programs out there that Debian doesn't compile for you. So that's bad? The wide array of packages is good and all still. But every distribution has their target audience (though users tend to want to impose them on everyone). RedHat strips theirs down a bit to make it manageable for those that don't know what everything is. There are still bazillions of RPMS around for everything else. And many, many anti-Redhat people talk how not learning to compile things is so evil, though I certainly find there's a market that doesn't want to compile things. But, these generalizations can be used against Debian just the same.
*accountability - if you find a bug, bug the package maintainer You can just as well with any program in the world, if you know who wrote it. This isn't a Debian-specific plus. It's a feature certainly encouraged in the Open Source world. People provide the sources so they can be reviewed and critiqued by the public, and get feedback, both good and bad. Show those developers you love their program, not just when there's problems.
*integrated menu system - consistent across window managers That's just a matter of config files. RedHat I believe just leaves many things in their default states. Which is suitable for me.
*consistency - tries to obey standards more. Which standards does Debian or doesn't RedHat follow? FTP is a standard, yet the Debian install doesn't give you that choice (one feature I liked in RH's install for CDROM-less stations).
Certainly we need more structured organization, papers that say, "these sort of files go here," or "this protocol is how you drag/drop". Groups like LSB are starting that. Are there many other existing standards like this that one either does/does not follow? Basically, that's a vague statement without a little more specifics.
*sections - non-free and non-us are kept separately from DFSG free stuff. That's nice. I'll give Debian that.
I'm getting tired. Anyway every distribution has their market. We don't need to sit and bicker over everything. A simple-man's distribution will have fewer packages to keep the new users confusion level down, and easier installation. A hard-core hacker's distribution will have tons of choices for those of us that like it. A PHB's distribution will have names like Corel, Sybase, whatever that they know and trust.
Use whichever is right for you. No one thing is right for everyone in every situation (even Linux).
If there was a concrete standard, what "commonly accdeted standards" are you referring to?
The folks (RH included) at Comdex basically swore to follow the LSB once it's release (6-12 months). So that argument is moot. But anyway, what's so different with the file structure? There's/etc,/home,/usr,/tmp...
Besides, variety is good. I don't want just one package format on the planet (either RPM or Debian), or one GUI, or one Web Browser.
I don't see the push for the GUI tools in RH, myself. I've mucked with config files manually for years, before even finding out about control-panel. I came from Slackware for a few years before that, and had no problem even adding users manually without adduser. I was just adding ifconfig's and routes to rc.local for the longest time too.:)
The first time I installed RedHat, somewhere around 3.x, the first things I started looking at was how/etc was different then my system before. And it wasn't all that difficult to find the config files and start vi'ing on them. One thing I will give the RedHat gui tools is printtool. It's certainly much easier to have that automatically set up all the ghostscript filters than how I used to do it manually. And it's worked well for the dozens of deskjets I've used it on.
Their books and documentation you get with the $30 probably detail how to use the GUI tools, but by no means are you stuck there. It's a good start for those without the experience, but by no means limiting to those of us with plenty of it.
No, 2001. That way it's greater than Windows' number, so therefore better. Well, I guess it should be like 2,000,000 by that reasoning, since Linux is at least 1000 times better than windows...
Citing their purpose, they want a GUI "compatible with present-day Windows offerings." Their goal is to convert Windows people by providing an environment that they will feel comfortable in right from the start. KDE does that reasonably well. Minimizing the learning curve is what PHBs will like to hear, as often time they're too cheap to send someone to a class to learn Linux. Yet there is still all the freedom we all have to install another distribution or applications and customize to your heart's content, as a certain portion of these users will want to delve deeper and learn more. Some will just live life using Wordperfect all day and nothing else. That's fine too.
This will get people to give Linux a chance, and they'll give improvements to Wine/KDE back to the community so it's good. You are not forced to use their distribution to run Wordperfect. Ultimately, Linux is Linux.
Do you have this available anywhere publicly? Preferably with links to the articles they came from? I have been toying with an anti-FUD editorial for a while...
Many time PHB's don't know what the servers are running. Microsoft tends to point to the number of licenses sold when they do their number crunching. Of course, this isn't accurate when LAN admins format and put Linux on a crashing server. But the end result, everyone's able to share files/print/etc, is what everyone loves. And PHBs are none the wiser.:)
Check my other post a few below yours, but basically they get it by taking snipits out of a conversation. Take Ransom Love's quote that we need to actively embrace standards, for example. Yes we need to do that, but it doesn't mean we don't currently embrace standards as they lean towards in the article.
I wouldn't be surprised if they weren't even at the meeting and only grabbed a transcript to write up the article. I didn't see many reporter-looking people, taking lots of notes or pictures at the sessions. Aside from Linus' keynote of course, they were snapping pictures from it than leaving immediately, trying to make it around all the people sitting on the floor, standing on every open piece of floorspace they could get.
Let me tell you what I saw at the sessions I attended at Comdex. These reports all too often stuck around for 10 minutes, go their photos and left. At Linus' keynote, they had difficulty leaving with all their luggage as it was very packed.
Anyway, at this one, Larry Augustin was the first to speak, and that was how he started on where Linux will go in the next year, taking the server arena and a good bit of the embedded area as well. Sure, Ransom Love said we have to "actively promote" standards, but not in any way like Linux currently doesn't do that as the article sounds to me at least. We need to join together more than we are with all these various wars (distributions, desktops, etc). Have good, open standards, and if every distribution/desktop obeys them we have all the choice we have always had with compatibility across all Linuxes, not just Intel-based Linux.
And Bob Young was not there, but another guy from RedHat. Ah well, they don't pay complete attention to these details (or ask the men themselves, I would just to make sure I spell names correctly and everything, but that's just me). But the guy did say basically for all intensive purposes, you could call him Bob Young.:) Still, I'd expect the "media" to get it straight.
Be sure to get an OpenLinux 2.2 as well. I caught it at Comdex this week, and the installer is very nice. It's definately something to try if people tell you, "but it's too hard to install." And the tetris game at the end is certainly nice.
Will GNOME be Red Hat's downfall?
on
Red Hat 6.0
·
· Score: 1
There are bindings to many languages (Perl, Python, etc). But most importantly is not the programming languages, but the human ones. KDE's been built since very early to be readable everywhere. There are bunches and bunches of translators continually moving the applications' phrases to work well in the dozens of langauges.
Not to rag on Gnome or anything, but are there similar efforts? Do the tutorials tell you to wrap every phrase around the gettext functions?
Wouldn't criminals be criminals already?
on
Red Hat 6.0
·
· Score: 1
Come on, seriously. What's to stop a terrorist from already sending things strongly encrypted? It's like the hype people stir up when there's a high school shooting. Banning guns won't stop criminals/lunatics from using them.
I tried gnome 1.0.8 or so recently as well. It's nice overally, a few things crashed here and there. I'd equate it to Beta4 or so in KDE's line. One thing that is needed is for the gnome folks to put programs together into a handful of primary packages, much like KDE, Gnomelibs, gnomecore, etc. That way you have a core set that is easy to install, severely tested for stability, takes care of all libraries in one swoop, etc. Myself, I was able to wade through the dependencies and what-not to install everything. But certainly, someone with less experience will give up before getting to the 10th package.
As to control-panel, it's tied to GTK. When you put a newer GTK on for gnome, it messes every other GTK app. So, just recompile and reinstall control-panel and it should be alright. Are the GTK folks ever going to just name the lib something like libgtk+.so.1? So we don't need to recompile every stinkin gtk app with an upgrade?
Come now, we all know our product (Linux) is better than Windows. So once we get world domination, the world will be at peace. It's that combination of a superior product and world domination that we are aspiring, not merely world domination at any cost.
Redhat has a "good" reputation
on
Red Hat 6.0
·
· Score: 1
Why do so many people complain because there are choices? Out one side of their mouth they're condeming Microsoft for restricting access users have, and only giving one possible desktop, etc. Then they bitch and moan because there are so many window managers, or desktops. The beauty of Linux is that there is so many possible roads you can take, and no one person sits back and decrees "You will use E from now on, and pay me $100 for the decision!"
Now, that said, people can chose a distribution that makes decisions for you, or sets things as their defaults, if the user doesn't want to decide right away. That being said, you are not locked into any one program (or group of programs). Once you get the hang of things and are more comfortable, format/reinstall a different distribution. And continue on learning more and more about Linux, and spreading the word.
Maybe I should write up a paper on this and set people straight... Trust me, choice is good!
RPM comes with the rpm2cpio utility. Use it to convert the package to a cpio, then use cpio to uncompress it in a temp directory. Then you can manually move things to the proper locations (/usr/bin,/usr/lib, etc). There you get the ultimate control over where it is installed. Oh, and do rpm -qp file.rpm --scripts to see what needs to be done before/after un/installing.
That is, if you absolutely refuse to use rpm itself.:)
Reason is Linux CDROM drvrs unforgiving of errors
on
Red Hat 6.0
·
· Score: 1
I don't understand it. If your CDROM is broke you have three options, use another media (network drives, ftp, hard drives, etc), get a different CDROM (ebay), or live with it. How/Why is RedHat (or anyone) supposed to write software that works on broke hardware?
You can just plop the libc5 libraires in say/usr/i486-libc5, add that directory to/etc/ld.so.conf, ldconfig, and voila, use all your old stuff as good as before.
I did just this when manually upgrading Redhat 4.2. I did this and put glibc2 in/lib, even though everything on my system was libc5 still. Then I slowly recompiled and redid all my rpms. Oh, I can go on and on of the joy of that experience (much easier than the a.out/elf transition, if anyone remembers back that far)...
I guess we'll have to go out and force all the companies that will do registration to not give out this sort of info. But I'm curious, how do they get things like number of employees or annual sales?
So spread the word that the RH test is a general Linux test sponsored by RedHat. The skills you need to go through all those prerequisites and the test outlines on RH's web pages most certainly pertain to any distribution, setting up NFS, firewalls, etc.
The differences between distributions is pretty minor in the grand scheme of things. I realize PHBs may not know that, so that's where we come in to say, "Hey! Linux is Linux, bub" (or something close to that:)).
All these in-house fighting between which distribution is evil incarnate and which is our savior, which company should have a certification test, or which desktop environment should be nuked off the planet all make it tough for an advocate to spread the good word of Linux. Let's face it, RedHat has money, and we can either bitch and moan, or use it to help everybody whether it's by hiring kernel/GNOME programmers or establishing tests to appease PHBs. RedHat isn't MS, we can voice our opinions to them with a decent chance of it being heard. They sure as hell don't want to be knocked off the market, so they'll do plenty to help Linux and OSS in general.
Of course, by MS releasing new versions of everything every 2 years, not only do they get money from the users buying the products, but then they also get to charge for training and certification for that new program.
Read up on RedHat's Certification program. It's not a Linux for Beginner's class. It's for people who know Linux well (there's a lengthy list of prerequisites). For those of us with knowledge, and want something pretty on resumes for those PHB's we're trying to please to get hired or a raise. So, passing the test shows you're fairly competent, and should be able to manage any distribution, not just RH.
I think it'd be tough to have general certifications until distros unify things like the file system organization. But taking the RHCE does show you're at least not a total nitwit. You should be able to manage around Debian, Slackware, etc after passing it.
Face it, hiring managers need a way to ensure that you really know your stuff. All too often I've seen them hire dolts that don't know what they're doing. Having the RHCE shows you are pretty competent (unlike a MCSE).
And as for MCSEs, no they don't last forever. When MS cancels a certain test, you have like a year to take a new one to replace it, or else you're out (as your NT 3.51 example). You have to keep up with their latest/greatest programs.
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Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying "Don't use Debian, use RedHat, dammit!!", but in the spirit of everyone at Comdex, to say, "Can't we all just get along?" :)
All the distributions have their own good/bad points. And there isn't one king of the distributions that everyone should use. All too often, when someone starts up another (or tweaks an existing) distribution, everybody jumps up and yell, "We've already got 1500 distributions (or one particular dist), go home!!" Each have their targetted audience (newbie, hacker, corporate, etc) and we should respect that. If one wants to target newbies and use KDE, great, more converts from that other OS. Rather, so many jump around, wave their hands, yelling, "Use GNOME!" or "GUIs suck, go text mode!" And where do we end up? Non-Linux people (PHBs for instance), just see us as rabid flamers that can't make up our minds.
My points in the post weren't to say everything Debian is worthless at all, but many of the points the original poster made can be applied to many distributions. The packaging system certainly seems very nicely organized for the best performance. I don't know everything about it, so I asked questions. I'm more than willing to be educated on anything. What happens? "Shut up." Yeah, real good PR those sort of comments can generate. We all need to be better advocates concentrating on the pluses of programs, less on the negatives ("XYZ sucks"). Oh, and provide concrete examples for arguments to say, "XYZ should be able to do feature ABC. It should do it like this," and provide code to back it up if you can (even pseudo-algorithms help for the non-programmers).
About the RPM problem, I've heard many people having it over the years. But I myself have never ran into it. I've installed, made my own, etc thousands of RPMs. I don't claim that the problem doesn't exist, just that I haven't had any problems with the system.
What I meant about FTP installing, was during the initial install. RedHat, for instance, has the choices for FTP, NFS, SMB installation instead of just the usual hard disk or cdrom. Heck, add more options to these, you never know what someone out there may need to get Linux installed. That is our goal here, to get more people to at least give us a try. These are a few things that every distribution could greatly benefit from. I had run into trouble with this when installing Debian on a spare PC without a CDROM. Sure doing an FTP install over a 28k modem is not practical, but I have other Linux boxes on my 100bT home LAN with CDROMs that served up very nicely in the RedHat based distributions I was toying with.
In conclusion, use what's right for you and for the job, not necessarily forcing anything down others' throats. This isn't Redmond, nothing works for every situation. And be a positive advocate for Linux and Open Source, it goes a long way.
*Better package management - dependencies that work!
I've never had trouble with RPM's dependencies. If it says it needs XYZ package first, ok, download and install it. But it's good to have different packagers, choice is your friend.
*apt - Upgrades your system from debians ftp site whenever you like, with next to no user interaction
Isn't that one of the beefs with RedHat so many have, taking users away from the nitty-gritty? You put your trust again, in one organization that all the packages are compatible, aren't trojaned, etc. Do they have any testing or reviewing board before a package is listed on the ftp server?
*alternatives - have emacs & xemacs, multiple vi... dont just blindly use whatever Red Hat could be bothered to compile
*loads more packages - apt-get will normally get and install the packages.
So, there's 500 million programs out there that Debian doesn't compile for you. So that's bad? The wide array of packages is good and all still. But every distribution has their target audience (though users tend to want to impose them on everyone). RedHat strips theirs down a bit to make it manageable for those that don't know what everything is. There are still bazillions of RPMS around for everything else. And many, many anti-Redhat people talk how not learning to compile things is so evil, though I certainly find there's a market that doesn't want to compile things. But, these generalizations can be used against Debian just the same.
*accountability - if you find a bug, bug the package maintainer
You can just as well with any program in the world, if you know who wrote it. This isn't a Debian-specific plus. It's a feature certainly encouraged in the Open Source world. People provide the sources so they can be reviewed and critiqued by the public, and get feedback, both good and bad. Show those developers you love their program, not just when there's problems.
*integrated menu system - consistent across window managers
That's just a matter of config files. RedHat I believe just leaves many things in their default states. Which is suitable for me.
*consistency - tries to obey standards more.
Which standards does Debian or doesn't RedHat follow? FTP is a standard, yet the Debian install doesn't give you that choice (one feature I liked in RH's install for CDROM-less stations).
Certainly we need more structured organization, papers that say, "these sort of files go here," or "this protocol is how you drag/drop". Groups like LSB are starting that. Are there many other existing standards like this that one either does/does not follow? Basically, that's a vague statement without a little more specifics.
*sections - non-free and non-us are kept separately from DFSG free stuff.
That's nice. I'll give Debian that.
I'm getting tired. Anyway every distribution has their market. We don't need to sit and bicker over everything. A simple-man's distribution will have fewer packages to keep the new users confusion level down, and easier installation. A hard-core hacker's distribution will have tons of choices for those of us that like it. A PHB's distribution will have names like Corel, Sybase, whatever that they know and trust.
Use whichever is right for you. No one thing is right for everyone in every situation (even Linux).
If there was a concrete standard, what "commonly accdeted standards" are you referring to?
/etc, /home, /usr, /tmp...
The folks (RH included) at Comdex basically swore to follow the LSB once it's release (6-12 months). So that argument is moot. But anyway, what's so different with the file structure? There's
Besides, variety is good. I don't want just one package format on the planet (either RPM or Debian), or one GUI, or one Web Browser.
I don't see the push for the GUI tools in RH, myself. I've mucked with config files manually for years, before even finding out about control-panel. I came from Slackware for a few years before that, and had no problem even adding users manually without adduser. I was just adding ifconfig's and routes to rc.local for the longest time too. :)
/etc was different then my system before. And it wasn't all that difficult to find the config files and start vi'ing on them. One thing I will give the RedHat gui tools is printtool. It's certainly much easier to have that automatically set up all the ghostscript filters than how I used to do it manually. And it's worked well for the dozens of deskjets I've used it on.
The first time I installed RedHat, somewhere around 3.x, the first things I started looking at was how
Their books and documentation you get with the $30 probably detail how to use the GUI tools, but by no means are you stuck there. It's a good start for those without the experience, but by no means limiting to those of us with plenty of it.
No, 2001. That way it's greater than Windows' number, so therefore better. Well, I guess it should be like 2,000,000 by that reasoning, since Linux is at least 1000 times better than windows...
Citing their purpose, they want a GUI "compatible with present-day Windows offerings." Their goal is to convert Windows people by providing an environment that they will feel comfortable in right from the start. KDE does that reasonably well. Minimizing the learning curve is what PHBs will like to hear, as often time they're too cheap to send someone to a class to learn Linux. Yet there is still all the freedom we all have to install another distribution or applications and customize to your heart's content, as a certain portion of these users will want to delve deeper and learn more. Some will just live life using Wordperfect all day and nothing else. That's fine too.
This will get people to give Linux a chance, and they'll give improvements to Wine/KDE back to the community so it's good. You are not forced to use their distribution to run Wordperfect. Ultimately, Linux is Linux.
Do you have this available anywhere publicly? Preferably with links to the articles they came from? I have been toying with an anti-FUD editorial for a while...
Many time PHB's don't know what the servers are running. Microsoft tends to point to the number of licenses sold when they do their number crunching. Of course, this isn't accurate when LAN admins format and put Linux on a crashing server. But the end result, everyone's able to share files/print/etc, is what everyone loves. And PHBs are none the wiser. :)
Check my other post a few below yours, but basically they get it by taking snipits out of a conversation. Take Ransom Love's quote that we need to actively embrace standards, for example. Yes we need to do that, but it doesn't mean we don't currently embrace standards as they lean towards in the article.
I wouldn't be surprised if they weren't even at the meeting and only grabbed a transcript to write up the article. I didn't see many reporter-looking people, taking lots of notes or pictures at the sessions. Aside from Linus' keynote of course, they were snapping pictures from it than leaving immediately, trying to make it around all the people sitting on the floor, standing on every open piece of floorspace they could get.
Let me tell you what I saw at the sessions I attended at Comdex. These reports all too often stuck around for 10 minutes, go their photos and left. At Linus' keynote, they had difficulty leaving with all their luggage as it was very packed.
:) Still, I'd expect the "media" to get it straight.
Anyway, at this one, Larry Augustin was the first to speak, and that was how he started on where Linux will go in the next year, taking the server arena and a good bit of the embedded area as well. Sure, Ransom Love said we have to "actively promote" standards, but not in any way like Linux currently doesn't do that as the article sounds to me at least. We need to join together more than we are with all these various wars (distributions, desktops, etc). Have good, open standards, and if every distribution/desktop obeys them we have all the choice we have always had with compatibility across all Linuxes, not just Intel-based Linux.
And Bob Young was not there, but another guy from RedHat. Ah well, they don't pay complete attention to these details (or ask the men themselves, I would just to make sure I spell names correctly and everything, but that's just me). But the guy did say basically for all intensive purposes, you could call him Bob Young.
Be sure to get an OpenLinux 2.2 as well. I caught it at Comdex this week, and the installer is very nice. It's definately something to try if people tell you, "but it's too hard to install." And the tetris game at the end is certainly nice.
There are bindings to many languages (Perl, Python, etc). But most importantly is not the programming languages, but the human ones. KDE's been built since very early to be readable everywhere. There are bunches and bunches of translators continually moving the applications' phrases to work well in the dozens of langauges.
Not to rag on Gnome or anything, but are there similar efforts? Do the tutorials tell you to wrap every phrase around the gettext functions?
Come on, seriously. What's to stop a terrorist from already sending things strongly encrypted? It's like the hype people stir up when there's a high school shooting. Banning guns won't stop criminals/lunatics from using them.
I tried gnome 1.0.8 or so recently as well. It's nice overally, a few things crashed here and there. I'd equate it to Beta4 or so in KDE's line. One thing that is needed is for the gnome folks to put programs together into a handful of primary packages, much like KDE, Gnomelibs, gnomecore, etc. That way you have a core set that is easy to install, severely tested for stability, takes care of all libraries in one swoop, etc. Myself, I was able to wade through the dependencies and what-not to install everything. But certainly, someone with less experience will give up before getting to the 10th package.
As to control-panel, it's tied to GTK. When you put a newer GTK on for gnome, it messes every other GTK app. So, just recompile and reinstall control-panel and it should be alright. Are the GTK folks ever going to just name the lib something like libgtk+.so.1? So we don't need to recompile every stinkin gtk app with an upgrade?
Come now, we all know our product (Linux) is better than Windows. So once we get world domination, the world will be at peace. It's that combination of a superior product and world domination that we are aspiring, not merely world domination at any cost.
Why do so many people complain because there are choices? Out one side of their mouth they're condeming Microsoft for restricting access users have, and only giving one possible desktop, etc. Then they bitch and moan because there are so many window managers, or desktops. The beauty of Linux is that there is so many possible roads you can take, and no one person sits back and decrees "You will use E from now on, and pay me $100 for the decision!"
Now, that said, people can chose a distribution that makes decisions for you, or sets things as their defaults, if the user doesn't want to decide right away. That being said, you are not locked into any one program (or group of programs). Once you get the hang of things and are more comfortable, format/reinstall a different distribution. And continue on learning more and more about Linux, and spreading the word.
Maybe I should write up a paper on this and set people straight... Trust me, choice is good!
RPM comes with the rpm2cpio utility. Use it to convert the package to a cpio, then use cpio to uncompress it in a temp directory. Then you can manually move things to the proper locations (/usr/bin, /usr/lib, etc). There you get the ultimate control over where it is installed. Oh, and do rpm -qp file.rpm --scripts to see what needs to be done before/after un/installing.
:)
That is, if you absolutely refuse to use rpm itself.
I don't understand it. If your CDROM is broke you have three options, use another media (network drives, ftp, hard drives, etc), get a different CDROM (ebay), or live with it. How/Why is RedHat (or anyone) supposed to write software that works on broke hardware?
You can just plop the libc5 libraires in say /usr/i486-libc5, add that directory to /etc/ld.so.conf, ldconfig, and voila, use all your old stuff as good as before.
/lib, even though everything on my system was libc5 still. Then I slowly recompiled and redid all my rpms. Oh, I can go on and on of the joy of that experience (much easier than the a.out/elf transition, if anyone remembers back that far)...
I did just this when manually upgrading Redhat 4.2. I did this and put glibc2 in
I guess we'll have to go out and force all the companies that will do registration to not give out this sort of info. But I'm curious, how do they get things like number of employees or annual sales?
So spread the word that the RH test is a general Linux test sponsored by RedHat. The skills you need to go through all those prerequisites and the test outlines on RH's web pages most certainly pertain to any distribution, setting up NFS, firewalls, etc.
:)).
The differences between distributions is pretty minor in the grand scheme of things. I realize PHBs may not know that, so that's where we come in to say, "Hey! Linux is Linux, bub" (or something close to that
All these in-house fighting between which distribution is evil incarnate and which is our savior, which company should have a certification test, or which desktop environment should be nuked off the planet all make it tough for an advocate to spread the good word of Linux. Let's face it, RedHat has money, and we can either bitch and moan, or use it to help everybody whether it's by hiring kernel/GNOME programmers or establishing tests to appease PHBs. RedHat isn't MS, we can voice our opinions to them with a decent chance of it being heard. They sure as hell don't want to be knocked off the market, so they'll do plenty to help Linux and OSS in general.
Of course, by MS releasing new versions of everything every 2 years, not only do they get money from the users buying the products, but then they also get to charge for training and certification for that new program.
Evil, pure and simple.
Read up on RedHat's Certification program. It's not a Linux for Beginner's class. It's for people who know Linux well (there's a lengthy list of prerequisites). For those of us with knowledge, and want something pretty on resumes for those PHB's we're trying to please to get hired or a raise. So, passing the test shows you're fairly competent, and should be able to manage any distribution, not just RH.
I think it'd be tough to have general certifications until distros unify things like the file system organization. But taking the RHCE does show you're at least not a total nitwit. You should be able to manage around Debian, Slackware, etc after passing it.
Face it, hiring managers need a way to ensure that you really know your stuff. All too often I've seen them hire dolts that don't know what they're doing. Having the RHCE shows you are pretty competent (unlike a MCSE).
And as for MCSEs, no they don't last forever. When MS cancels a certain test, you have like a year to take a new one to replace it, or else you're out (as your NT 3.51 example). You have to keep up with their latest/greatest programs.