Re: debian [was Re: tlug: Problems with Motif 2.0 and XFree86-3.3.1]

[Craig Oda <craig@example.com>]

On Fri, 28 Nov 1997, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

> But especially at system installation, if you've got requirements the
> RedHat maintainers haven't foreseen, it's really hard to get around
> the inherent limitations.  Most Debian stuff OTOH is implemented as
> scripts and flat-file text databases; it's easy to figure out how to
> do what you want by hand in the occasional case where it's needed.

I completely agree with you here.  Although I like the GNU attitude
and community spirit of the Debian project, I'm still pretty 
practical when it comes to choosing a system I use every day,
for most of the day.  What made me switch from Red Hat to Debian
was when I messed up the package database on Red Hat.  I've done
this a few times on Debian, but on Debian it is a flat file.
On Red Hat, I think it was in a compressed or database format.
Anyway, I remember that I was unable to open it up and look for
the glitch.  Also, the last time I tried Red Hat, I think it 
sets up its own configuration files for some things.  

Being Linux-based, anything I didn't like about Red Hat could be
fixed.  Both Debian and Red Hat are really good distributions 
and both have excellent
dependency features.  The reason I never went back to Red Hat
was that I found the Debian-JP project and find that it is 
pretty fully developed.    Other reasons are really minor,
for example I like the Debian stance on GNOME and KDE.  This
is purely personal, and I think KDE will be very popular, but
GNOME has that community spirit that first attracted me to Linux.

On the other hand, IMHO Red Hat may make the best inroads into
the corporate market, due to its popularity and corporate development
structure.  For example, looking at http://www.redhat.com,
one of the big developments is that availability of vendor-backed
commercial support contracts.  On that same page there are
announcements about commercial software from Netscape, Crack
dot Com, and TriTeal CDE.

I think that it is marvelous that there is competition and
brand loyalty among different Linux distributions.  

At the next meeting on Dec. 13th we should have both 
Debian and Red Hat based machines.  Cool, maybe someone
can finally teach me how to use glint.


Regards,
Craig




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