Re: [tlug] Redhat

[Jonathan Byrne <jq@example.com>]

On Tue, Sep 09, 2003 at 05:16:14PM +0900, James Cluff wrote:

>quite figure out what is going to happen after release 10.  Any ideas?  one

Release 11, within a year, b/c after a year they will EOL release 10, at
least for everyone who isn't an Enterprise customer.

>compatible, they are more focusing on BSD, turbolinux, Mandrake and Debian.

I wouldn't focus on TL, because, well, they're TL, and you spell that
"has been."  I wouldn't focus on Mandrake, because, well, it's Mandrake.
that leaves BSD and Debian, fine systems all :-)  I migrated from
Red Hat (used TL before that) to Debian mostly because of Bluecurve.
However, if that hadn't been enough, their current support policies
would be quite enough to drive me off.  I know they have to make a
profit, I know there is only a limited amount of help to go around,
etc., but dropping support for a release when it's only a year old is
too much.

If you haven't experimented with a hard drive install of Knoppix, give
that a try also.  It's Debian Unstable under the hood.  To do
it, boot the Knoppix CD and type:

knoppix lang=us 2

To boot it into single-user text mode.  Then run:

/usr/bin/knx-hdinstall

It will ask you a few questions, run cfdisk so you can set up any needed
partitions (note: it won't use anything but swap and / by doing this,
you'll need to move things around into /usr, /var, /home, etc., manually
after the install), then copy all of the files to the disk, and
install LILO.

I just got a Thinkpad 600X (P3-500/256/12 ) and it went in without
a hitch.  The machine came with the factory IBM load of Windows 98SE,
and Knoppix picked that up and put it into lilo.conf as a boot option
without even having to be told.  Amusingly, I've had this machine only
a few hours and Win 98 has been booted for only about 20 minutes, yet
it has already managed to crash once, and it has no driver for my
PC card NIC (3Com/Megahertz, very common stuff) so I have to use
Linux to download a driver for it :-)

For networking, I told it to use DHCP, and I had just done a 5-minute
shake-n-bake install of dhcpd on my workstation a few minutes before
so it would have a place from which to get DHCP info, and that went
flawlessly as well.

I would still encourage people to know how to install Debian with
the stock installer, but Knoppix as a  Debian installer is
pretty impressive.

Performance-wise, even running KDE (3.1.2) the performance of the 600X
under Linux is quite acceptable.  When I boot it into Win98SE, by contrast,
it's a pig, even with 256 MB of memory.  Using Linux really spoils a
person :-)

Jonathan
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