[ale] Linux Distributions

[Michael Hirsch]

On 5/16/05, Mark Schill <meson3902 at gmail.com> wrote:
>  Greetings, 
>   
> I have played around with Linux for many years, but I have always stuck with
> the big boys. IE Red Hat and SUSE. I know there are more distributions out
> there and wanted to get input on what the members of the linux community use
> and why. 

I switched to Mandrake a while agao for three reasons.  First, it was
quite redhat-like, second it was KDE based and redhat has weak support
for KDE, and third, it was the only distribution with a sane CD
mounting system.  SuSE now has one, too, so I would consider switching
to it.  I don't know whether Gentoo, etc, have one.

Here's my test.  Suppose you use /mnt/cdrom as your cd mount point. 
Start with an empty CD drive.  Start a shell (either VT or in a window
window)
1. cd /mnt/cdrom; ls
   Nothing there.
2. insert CD.  run 'ls'.  You should see the files.  (Note: no mount
command issued.)
3. eject CD by pressing the button on the CD drive.  disk should eject.  
4. run 'ls'.  See that there is nothing there.

Until a system can suport this, I don't think it is ready for prime
time.  Unix expoerts who have gotten used to the feeble unix support
for CDs can live without it, but my wife, kids, father, and mother
cannot.  And I don't want to have to, either.

I'd be interested to know of other distributions that can pass this
test.  Mandrake used to use SuperMount for this, and SuSE uses
submount, I believe.  I'd also be interested to hear of other
solutions.

Michael