[ale] please won't someone help me with Linux

[Joe Bayes]

Chris Ricker typeth:
>On Sun, 20 Jun 1999, Wandered Inn wrote:

>> Generally, you'll find most folks have their favorite dist, but very few
>> folks have a lot of experience with more then one or two.
>
>My $.02, since I actually do have a lot of experience w/ lots ;-).

Hey, great summary! I've been considering switching from RH to
Mandrake, but I figured that if I went ahead and upgraded I might as
well find one I liked first. 

>***Mandrake

Mandrake also claims to have everything compiled with PGCC. They also
say they distribute all their source and documentation in .bz2 format;
I'm surprised RH and the rest haven't moved over to this. Disk may be
cheap, but it ain't free.

>Debian and RH are special in
>that they're the only completely open-sourced distributions, which matters

Almost. RH includes some non-open-source s/w in their distribution
(netscape, at least...I'm not sure how many others). However, they
open-source all of the software they write in-house. 

>Similarly, the ethics behind Mandrake and the like bother me slightly.  
>What they do is certainly legal, but I don't think it's very ethical, and I
>don't think it's good for the Linux community in the long term--someone's
>got to spend the millions that RH does on R & D and on paying kernel hackers
>to code, and which RH won't be able to afford to spend if people like
>Mandrake continue to sell what is essentially RH's product at a
>significantly lower price; 

Remember that Red Hat didn't make Red Hat Linux. Linus (& cast of
thousands) did most of the work; Red Hat just took everybody else's
work, put it together and put whipped cream on top, and charged money
for it. Linus worked hard to make sure that I can pay $2 for whatever
Linux I want, and I plan to honor him by doing so. :)

(Which is not to say that I won't fork over some money/time for R&D,
but that is (and should be) entirely voluntary.)

In any case, Red Hat's product (i.e. what people actually pay for) is
90% tech support and hand holding, and Mandrake isn't selling Red
Hat's tech support, they make their own. 

JMHO,

--joe

p.s. That said, has anybody been able to find a ftp site with the
1300+ rpms on CDs #3 and 4 of their Power Pack?