Re: [ossig] Enterprise Linux: UserLinux, Debian

[Seah Hong Yee <hongyee@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wednesday 18 August 2004 19:41, Mukhsein Johari wrote:
> This seems to tie in with our own (local) concerns wrt
> open source and linux. IMHO, Bruce has a good idea.
> Here's hoping the execution is well done as well.
>
> Have a read here for different take on the article on
> Vnunet.com, entitled "Perens readies old-school Linux,
> but who wants it?"
>
> http://www.desktoplinux.com/articles/AT5016155846.html
>
>
>
> On a slightly tangential note:
> I find it intriguing that many of the interesting
> linux distros / projects are making use of Debian (eg.
> Knoppix/Gnoppix, UserLinux). That is, instead of
> others like Fedora or Slackware or Gentoo. Anyone with
> thoughts / experiences as to why this might be? Surely
> it's more than simply "apt-get" and .debs?
>

I am not sure of slackware as I had never run them but Debian is usually quite 
clean in terms of design and packages are quite nicely done. You have fewer 
chances of breaking something when you update/upgrade. 

	It is no secret that Redhat patch its kernel beyond recognition and the same 
is with fedora. Besides, Fedora really has a number of problem in terms of QA 
issues and a number of thing will break when you do something here and there 
especially with respect to installing something new. 

IMHO, the only distro that come close (which happened to be my favourite) is 
Mandrake with its URPMI, but like Fedora, it is quite messy sometimes and 
upgrade path can sometimes be problematic. For example, I had a server 
running 10.0 and all the 9.2 workstation have problem accessing the NFS 
share. Most of these are QA issue really. Debian has such a high standard for 
QA that it rarely ship a release.  One thing nice about URPMI is, I had one 
time updated to 9.2 from 9.1 by adding the new source and all the 
dependencies were satisfied. It took around two days and 2 gig worth of 
download. 

I am not sure why people don't choose fedora out right but I suspect lack of 
good package management and updating ( no, I don't think up2date is that good 
when compare to apt). 2nd is because most of the packages are really well for 
Fedora or Redhat, if you change something, it is likely to be broken. From my 
experience, I can use apt on Xandros and it would work. (even though not 
really officially supported). 

However, JDS is based on SUSE though.

> It's also interesting that 2 of the top 5 distros on
> http://www.distrowatch.com/ are consistently:
>
> * Knoppix
> * Debian
>
> I just find it weird that a distro whose "stable"
> release is consistently about 2-3 years old (more?),
> could be so popular.


Nobody really run "stable" debian. Most people just install debian and use apt 
get to update to one of the more recent tree. Here's another tip, the easiest 
way to install debian is boot off knoppix and install debian from there. 

>
>
>
>
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