Re: [tlug] State of "Linux" documentation [was: Books]

["Jonathan Byrne" <jonathan@example.com>]

On 6/7/2008, "Scott Robbins" <scottro@example.com> wrote:

>
>However, an RHCE friend of mine tells me that RH is quite proud of its
>GUI config tools for servers, so the chapter on using those won't help
>with Ubuntu.
>
>The chapter on using yum or its GUI frontend won't help.

I think that your original statement that a book on using Red Hat isn't
going to be all that helpful for using Ubuntu, is fairly accurate.
Whether the GUI is GNOME or KDE (and I'll let lie the potential
discussion of whether or not using $DESKTOP counts as using the OS per
se or not), Red Hat has gone to great lengths to make KDE and GNOME both
like the same under the Blue Curve theme, so they're going to both look
a lot different than they do on any distro not based on Red Hat or
Fedora, and that alone may be enough to throw some people. And of
course, as you mention, the graphical configuration tools are going to
be quite different.

However, that's OK. I don't think that's even necessarily sad. It's
all a matter of approach. If you think of Red Hat, Ubuntu, Mandriva,
SuSE, Debian, Slackware, and  Gentoo as "all Linux," then yes, the
perceived fragmentation may also then look like more of a problem than
it usually is in practice.

In my view, those are all different operating systems that share a common
kernel (more or less; good luck with dropping a Red Hat kernel into a
Debian system) and userland (more or less), that run - for the most part
- common windowing environments or full desktop environments. It's
somewhat like the proprietary UNIX landscape of decades past, although
the various Linux distros are more closely related to each other than
Solaris is to HPUX is to AIX. An application that will compile from a
source tarball on the current version of Fedora is more likely to
compile from a source tarball with few or no tweaks on the current
version of Ubuntu than if you tried the same thing on contemporary (to
each other) versions of Solaris and AIX. This is so because you'll get
similar versions of the same compiler, similar versions of the same C
libraries, etc. Between two proprietary UNIXen, you may have two
different proprietary compilers and two different proprietary C
libraries, or one may be using gcc, or even a third-party proprietary
compiler.

So if you look at it that way - Red Hat and Ubuntu are different
operating systems that use a lot of parts in common and share common
file formats such that moving data between them is seamless and porting
apps between them is usually trivial - the fact that a book on one might
be only 50% helpful (or less) WRT the other is not really a problem. If
you have Red Hat, buy a Red Hat book. If you have Ubuntu, buy an Ubuntu
book. Nobody's wringing their hands or the fact that a book on Solaris
might not be all that useful to a person using HPUX.


>It's probably more difficult to switch from an RH based distro (e.g.,
>Fedora) to a Debian based one (e.g., Ubuntu) than it is to switch from
>one BSD to another.

BSDs do seem to more closely resemble each other, and also to generally
not go in much for graphical configuration tools and typically run GNOME
or KDE as they come from the upstream source, so I think that's a fair
statement.

But of course, since <Slashdot>BSD is still dying</Slashdot>, who cares?
;-)

Kidding, of course. I run FreeBSD on my home fileserver and like it quite
well. In some areas of hardware support, I've even found it to be
better than Linux (at least in my experience, FreeBSD tends to support a
wider range of ATA "fake" RAID controllers; for example, I have a four
year old Gigabyte motherboard with onboard SATA RAID that has never
worked in any Linux distro I've tried with it, but it works in FreeBSD).

Jonathan