Re: [Sheflug] Distros

["Chris J" <cej [at] xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

And Lo! The Great Prophet Andy Bloomfield uttered these words of wisdom:
> 
> My question is, what distro should I install on the new box? I've been 
> wanting to try something different for a while.
> I'm very familiar with RPM but I'm also comfortable compiling and 
> installing stuff manually.

Slackware ;) I suspect many others may suggest Debian, but personally I 
don't like it. SuSE I'd probably avoid -- unless its changed recently, it 
has a large "minimum install" footprint, disk space that could easily be 
best served elsewhere. Though that said, with disks as cheap as they are, 
this could be considered a non-issue.

>
> emerge doesn't seem to check dependencies when removing packages...
> 

Slackware has basic package management - i.e., you can remove a package and 
install a package. It has /no/ dependency checking (which I prefer; I find
dependency checking just gets in the way and some dists have put me off 
dependency checking for life).

I suppose it comes down to what you're used to and how much of a change 
you're willing to endure. As for other dists, I can't comment on them as 
I've never used them -- I've not kept up with all the newer dists :-)

Or if you want something /really/ different, look at Free/Net/Open BSD, 
which generally are top notch operating systems. Their ports trees are 
exceptionally good (I run Open on a firewall, and have used Net on a couple 
of non-Intel machines).

There isn't any one good dist though - each has their merits and their 
downsides (the arguments are usually about what's a merit and what's not). 
It may be a case of poke about with a couple and see what you like. What do 
you want the dist to do? Do you like tools that prompt you for 
configuration, or are you happy to dive in with vi[1] and hack away 
manually (or learn to hack away manually)?

I'll answer these for Slack (as it's really the only one I know much about) 
- you're pretty much on your own. There isn't anything that gets in the 
way, and you can hack the config files about to your hearts content without 
a dist-specific tool rewriting the file at reboot or something equally 
silly. It doesn't hand-hold. However, that said -- the installation is 
smooth - the basic things (basic network settings, keyboard mappings, 
timezones - the stuff you'd expect) are asked for during the install, so 
they aren't things you have to run about for after.

This turned out longer than anticipated -- sorry about that, but I think 
you get the idea O:-)

Chris...

-- 
\ Chris Johnson                 \ NP: Kate Bush - 12. The Morning Fog
 \ cej [at] nightwolf.org.uk          \  
  \ http://cej.nightwolf.org.uk/  \ 
   \ http://redclaw.org.uk/        ~---------------------------------------


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