[ale] Distributions

[David S. Jackson]

So then Michael B Golden (naugrim at juno.com) said . . .

> First, note that I don't want to cause any type of religious war here.
> 
> 	Okay, here is my question. I have seen a lot of stuff about
> RedHat all over the place, and so I was going to try RedHat to see what
> all the hype about it is, yet when I went to their site to see what their
> distribution has I can't see any reason to try it. Slackware seems to
> have more than theirs. My main purpose in this message is to find out
> what distribution is best for me. I don't want bashing of other
> distributions, just what features different and/or better than Slackware
> are in the others. If I find reason enough to try them in the replies I
> receive, I may try the suggested ones and make my decision then. As such,
> I would like detailed replies about each of the distributions used by the
> members of this list. I don't care if you reply privately or on the list.

IMHO Linux is basically Linux.  The only thing different between
distributions is what is included on the CD and how it is packaged.  (I mean
what type of package management system does it have.)

Slackware is a fine distribution, and it certainly will do the job.  My only
problem with it is that it's rather hard to upgrade in place.  People that I
know usually just back up key filesystems, wipe each required partition, and
install a new system.  Then restore backed up data and configuration files
from tape, or whatever.  This certainly has its positive aspect, because you
don't get a bunch of stuff piled on layer after layer of upgrades, which can
be a problem.  But if production is a concern, it's easier to upgrade in
place.

Red Hat has been getting a LOT of press lately, and that's probably because
they have very good marketing savvy.  They have some sharpies working on
continually refining their business model as well as their technical
quality.  So, they were the first distribution to complete the upgrade to a
GNU libc, and while the transition was rather rocky at times, it's pretty
stable now.  (The GNU libraries have various advantages and disadvantages,
but if you compile your own software, you'll be able to take advantage of
them.  Also, you'll be able to use the gobs software compiled for libc6, as
well as for libc5.

Red Hat uses a package managment system called RPM (Redhat Package
Manager).  It's very good because it allows you to upgrade your entire
system without reformatting partitions or deleting entire filesystems, and
so on.  In a production environment, this is good usually.  Slack's
packaging system doesn't allow you to track dependencies like RPM or DPKG
(Debian's package management system) do.  (There is an RPM HOWTO for
Slackware though....)

Debian is also one of the old time distributions, and it's a very high
quality distribution.  Red Hat and Caldera are the two most commercial
distributions while Debian is probably the most non-commercial.  It has the
closest ties with the free software federation, at least politically, and
its developers pride themselves on not releasing a distribution until it's
bug free.  Sometimes other more commercial distributions don't debug as
thoroughly as Debian does, and Red Hat's transition from libc5 to libc6
(glibc) was an example of this (they only had relatively few problems, but
those problems got lots of press), and Debian earned quite a bit of techie
points that Red Hat dropped at this juncture.  So far Debian and Red Hat are
the only two distributions Glibc.  Others have included glibc runtime
libraries that will let you run binaries compiled from libc6, but they don't
give you the development libraries.  Debian's version 2.0 was a little late
in appearing, but it was stable from the gitgo, while RHL 5.0 had some
hiccups.  RHL 5.1 and 5.2 are pretty darned rock solid.  I would say that
any glibc problems now are distribution-independent.  Debian's DPKG is every
bit as good as RPM, IMHO, and it will probably blow it away when Deity and
APT are both completed.

Caldera and SuSE use RPM, as do Stampede and several others.  Caldera has
had the reputation of being the most commercially oriented because they
have included quite a few commercial applications on their CD.  I'm not sure
this is true anymore, after seeing RH 5.2 "Sampler CD"; there were lots of
lite versions for commercial packages on that CD.

I've looked at Caldera, SuSE, Slackware, RH, Debian, and I'm probably most
fond of Debian at this point.  RH would be shortly after it, and then
probably Slack.  But that's just me.  I like the Debian installation
philosophy better than RH's, though RH is probably easier for a new person
to do.  Caldera, RH, and SuSE probably have the best installation routines
overall, IMO.  YMMV.

The nice thing about Linux is that you aren't ever married to one
distribution.  It's just that you can't really upgrade a Slackware
distribution with a Caldera distribution, etc, though someone may well have
done it.  If you're willing to wipe partitions, you can delete the old
distribution, install the new distribution, and restore data and config
filesystems from backups.  (Be careful, though, because configuration
formats are usually changed between versions of software; your old DOSEMU
config files won't necessarily work with your new DOSemu package, for
example.)  But mostly you can just keep trying distributions until you have
been exposed to the ones that interest you and then choose whatever blows
your skirt up.

:-) 

PS.  Phil Hughes wrote an article in a fairly recent Linux Journal comparing
distributions.  You might check the archives.

--
David S. Jackson                           http://www.dsj.net