tlug: advice needed: choosing a distribution

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "John" == John Seebach <jseebach@example.com> writes:

    John> Debian 2.1 and Linux-Mandrake 5.3 (essentially redhat 5.2 +
    John> KDE)

Debian should be satisfactory for your usage; all that stuff is well
supported.  To get Japanese on a RedHat system you probably need to go
to a third-party Japanese add-on, and they pretty much suck.  IMHO, of
course. I think Rob Bickel (my coauthor, so I respect his opinion,
right?) may disagree, he thinks JRPM and PJE do pretty well.  In
Debian, _most_ but not all of the Japanese stuff is integrated into
the main distribution (although as usual with Japanese stuff they
screwed the dependencies; I believe this is fixed now).

If you have thoughts of doing nerdly stuff, then Debian is more likely 
to do it right, in my experience; RedHat has a habit of hacking on the 
packages to make them work right, then fixing the inevitable
incompatibilities later (as far as I know HJ does not work for RedHat, 
this seems to be a case of independent invention).  This is usually
poorly documented, as they expect you to use the software in a RedHat
system.

Debian contribs are more reliable in my experience.  I just don't
touch RedHat contribs anymore.

    John> I've spent quite a bit of time poking around the debian ftp
    John> site, and I must say that I like the fact that the
    John> distribution looks fairly minimalist and clean (also, they

Debian is the best on "minimalist" and "clean".  There is no
comparison on "documentation," Debian rocks, they have _all_ the docs!

    John> seem to have included most of the tools I'd need to get
    John> japanese input working, which is a big plus).

Not "most".  _All_.  But I think RH has a full Japanese distribution
now, and TurboLinux is quite good for Japanese.

I don't know where the various distributions are going, so this is
hearsay, but a little bird (actually, fairly large and somewhat round)
named "Ulrich" told me that nobody does Japanese right yet (to be
fair, it won't be possible until he releases glibc 2.2, but he
promises full and correct wctomb support); he thinks that TurboLinux
is probably not salvageable :-(, RedHat doesn't care (they'll just
supply the new glibc release and wait for the bug reports), and maybe
Debian has the best chance of getting it right soon.  Uli is very
opinionated (hey, Mom, look who's talking!) so all that is very much
YMMV FWIW OTOH and IHNSHO.  :-)

    John> Plus that little "apt" program just looks so _cool_,
    John> esp. relative to what I'm used to.

It rocks.  I'm looking forward to the GUI version.

    John> From what I gather, setting mandrake up for this kind of
    John> usage is pretty much a no-brainer, which appeals to the lazy
    John> bastard in me which would like to have a nice, tweaked,
    John> more-or-less functional system before, oh, say, June.

In my (limited, 6 installs, 3 on one machine) experience Debian gets X
right first time, every time.  None of the distributions makes you
build or install X (unless you consider an operation equivalent to
"tar x" "installation").

All the distributions tend to make the same mistakes, since the
"intelligence" is mostly in XFree86 to start with.  Each distribution
adds a little on its own, but most of the necessary information is in
the CARDS database and the SuperProbe utility, both XFree86 components.

    John> So. Which distribution to try first, that is the question,
    John> and one that I'm sure has been beaten to death before.

Debian is a safe choice; Mandrake I know nothing about so it could be
better.  RedHat usually works, but when it doesn't, hoo boy.  Nothing
works.  Since Debian wants you to install a full Unix system from
bog-standard floppies (about 7 + the boot/rescue disk now ;-) before
doing the fancy stuff, you (yes, I mean you) can fix just about
anything (hosed PCMCIA drivers, non-standard PCI/BIOS settings, etc).
RedHat (or TurboLinux) uses fewer floppies but you have to rebuild the
install system (yeech, you'd better have a working system somewhere
for that operation) if you get hosed before the base system comes up.
(Very rare, I'm sure, but it's happened to me with both RedHat, in a
galaxy long long ago and far far away, RH 4.0 i386 to be sure, and
TurboLinux, that was a beta.  Still, twice-burned forever shy.)

As for "beaten to death," new Linux distributions seem to be
proclaimed on a monthly basis, and even the established guys change
their relative advantages a couple times a year.

-- 
University of Tsukuba                Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences       Tel/fax: +81 (298) 53-5091
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