[ale] Linux distribution

[James P. Kinney III]

In short:
All of them!

A good short list is:
Debian
Mandrake
Suse
Slackware

Those 4, along with RedHat are the "backbone" of the distributions. RH,
Mandrake and Suse use rpm's, although each is slightly different enough
to cause incompatibilities between them. Debian has its own packager.
Slackware use tarballs. 

Which one has the most stable setup? It depends on what you are trying
to do. RedHat wins for being installable on the most x86 boxes. Debian
wins for having an incredible package system for getting something you
don't have. Suse has a well designed admin app. Mandrake seems to be
geared well towards the workstation setup. Slackware just runs. and
runs. and runs.

Security:
As they all work from the same base of source code, they are all
vulnerable to the same security problems. I would have to give RedHat
the win here with Mandrake running a fairly close second. The RedHat
network is a great service. Due to Debians developer distribution, they
are often a bit later on the repair for internally caused bugs than
RedHat, but they are frequently first to fix security bugs from a
BugTraq report. Slackware is not as active as any of these others. Suse
is quite on the ball for security fixes as well. They all have a
reputation to uphold.

Support:
RedHat in the US, Suse in the EU, by a landslide. I'm referring to
purchasable, contract-style support. 

I just can't include Caldera as a major player anymore. They seem to be
fading into oblivion. Too bad. 

On Wed, 2002-02-20 at 14:18, Mark E. Schill wrote:
> This may cause a lot of discussion so let me apologize first. I want to 
> check out a linux distribution other than Red Hat. Which one would you 
> recommend??
> 
> Mark
> 
> -- 
> Mark E. Schill MCP CCA
> Mark.Schill at cmschill.net
> 
> 
> 
> 
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-- 
James P. Kinney III   \Changing the mobile computing world/
President and COO      \          one Linux user         /
Local Net Solutions,LLC \           at a time.          /
770-493-8244             \.___________________________./

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
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