Re: distros

["Tim R. Geier" <tim@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Apr 28, 2000 at 02:42:38PM -0400, t.bedlam wrote:
> 
> 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!?

Sure, it's more fun ;)

> 
> > 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 had a really tiny hd when I started using linux, I *had* to pick and choose.

> 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!

You don't know much you miss bash until you find yourself with another shell
(happened to me with OpenBSD and IRIX 6.5, though it wasn't terribly hard 
getting bash for those)   

> 
> > 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.

Yeah, no wonder the package conversion tool is called alien.

> 
> .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.

A GUI install app on debian?  FreeBSD's going to get an influx of users right 
around then (j/k) 


> 
> 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.
> 

probably not, but one can move any config files, etc. that one wants to save.

> > 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...

hrm..well, this is one of the most rational takes on Debian I've seen lately (a
lot better than "bah.  use debian, fool.")  Maybe I'll give it a chance (still a 
big maybe, though) 

> 
> -- 
> bedlam@concentric.net || http://www.concentric.net/~bedlam

-- 
Tim R. Geier
Modineer IT