Re: distros

["t.bedlam" <bedlam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Apr 28, 2000 at 12:20:36PM -0400, Tim R. Geier was only 
   escaped alone to tell thee:

> Well, from the beginning, slackware has always been totally customizable,
> there are no gui tools included to administrate and configure your system,
> so you learn to do everything by hand (RTFM'ing is mandatory)  I also

Eeeuw. I'm not sure I'm up to that. :) I mean, I slap around my /etc files
pretty much at will now, never having used linuxconf except, I think, at
install, but I'm not sure I'm up to doing the WHOLE BOX!?

> I'll never use TeX, and Slackware packages that under the "T" series,
> thus, I don't install the T series and I never have to worry about it.
> There's also the "E" series for Emacs that I also don't touch ;)

!Vive la Vim! See, I'm not sure what I will and will not need, so I slammed
just about everything onto the box. Stupid? Yeah, maybe, but my experience
with *nix was minimal before this. I remember using vi and Emacs over a
2400 baud dial-up C shell--*real* vi and C shell, it was a SPARCStation! I
distinctly remember wondering, how do people do anything useful with
these tools? I got a book from the library and, first thing, switched to 
bash!

> Slack 7 does includes a rpm package and the conversion utility rpm2tgz,

I have tarball-installed my most used tools--mutt, slrn, gpg, &c., and have
changed only the most trivial settings in Makefiles. I think Debian does a
good job of following Linux Standard Base and all; or I should say it does
since I've used it, at least. Precompiled Netscapes have given me the only
headaches so far. Well, no: the tarball of xv sucked the rust from a manure
shovel, now I think of it. Fortunately the Debians (sound like ET's, don't
they?) had overcome their principles long enough to devise a .deb file.

.deb files are pretty sweet. dpkg is a nice CLI tool, dselect is mostly
okay, if slow as a baby with no arms, apt-get transparently points to http
and ftp sites with the latest .debs, and apt, a full-featured GUI install
app, will debut on Debian 2.2 soon, so they say. You may force dependencies
if you so choose. Judging from the sysadmin of Kendall College of Art and
Design's testimony, .rpms are widespread but sometimes dependency-buggy. He
is currently happily at home with a Mandrake system.

All these package tools interact very well with each other.

> And when it comes time to remove packages, you can get a preview of what
> files and directories are exactly going to be removed, so you can clear
> out anything you want to keep before issuing the "removepkg".

I've not removed much, so I've not investigated the removal process. But
dpkg-deb can issue the information for a .deb and also spit out the files it
will install/remove. I'm not sure if you can remove files from the purge.

> Init-wise, it's BSD-style, though there is a package in 7 that'll put in a
> pseudo-SysV init structure for packages that require them (also known as
> Red Hat-only) In terms of number of packages,

Debian is very SysV-init. I like it: never having known anything else.
Debian has not the packages that SuSE nor Red Hat have, but as I noted, .tgz
has worked rather well, and the binary-only single CD dist I have is full,
and has no unfree .debs -- I got the xv .deb from Debian's website. They
might have complete .debs of NN now that Netscape allows redistribution of
code... hmmm...

-- 
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