Fwd: Re: [ale] Linux Distributions

[Chris Ricker]

Sorry Don, I realized after I sent this I forgot to set the address
correctly....

------ Forwarded message ------>>
    From: Chris Ricker <gt1355b at prism.gatech.edu>
 Subject: Re: [ale] Linux Distributions
    Date: Mon, 29 Sep 1997 22:40:17 +0000 (GMT)
      To: don at cc.gatech.edu
Reply-To: gt1355b at prism.gatech.edu

On 29 Sep, Don Allison wrote:
> 
> I thought a month or so ago, RedHat was shipping a 2.0.29 kernel with 4.2
> while Slackware was using 2.0.30 in 3.3.

I think it's currently 2.0.30 + the important parts of David Miller's
last 2.0.31 pre-patch.  I'm not sure what Thunderbird uses.

> Bottom line: can anyone talk about what a Debian install is like? :-)

Well, I started out with Slackware in the 1.1.59 days a few years ago. 
Since then, I've installed Slackware, RedHat, Caldera, and Debian (a
couple of releases of FreeBSD too) on various machines (some for jobs,
some mine).  At this point in the game, I'd say anything out-of-date,
using BSD inits, and without a package manager is automatically out
(Slackware).  Debian's install, last time I tried it, seemed like it
would be kinda fearsome if you didn't know what you were doing.  Also,
I prefer rpm to deb and dislike some of the development procedures by
some at Debian (some Debian developers will split development of
certain software, rather than contributing patches back to the
maintainers of the software), so that rules out Debian. Caldera's
basically like Redhat, but I find their patch releases almost as
confusing as Solaris's 6 digit random number system ;-). Also, Caldera
tends to wait longer between releases, being targeted at the stable
business audience more or less exclusively.  Development of Redhat is
much more open than Caldera, and they support three architectures with
rumors of a fourth, while Caldera is likely never to do more than
Intel.  That's more or less why I prefer Redhat....  If you care about
things like support (questionably; Caldera won't support you if you do
something reasonable like shadow your system, from what I gather on
their mailing list) or Netscape products or "pretty" desktops, that
might sway you towards Caldera over Redhat.  Which isn't to say
Redhat's perfect; for example, I loathe FVWM 95 and TheNextLevel, and
will probably hate whatever that Enlightenment developer they hired
comes up with even more....

later,
chris

--
Chris Ricker                                 gt1355b at prism.gatech.edu