Re: a new BSWare

[awilliam@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]

>>>I tried making my own distro once... wasn't really anything 
special,
>>>though.  Right now, though, if I were going to make one, I would
>>>probably want it to be something like a cross between Debain and
>>>Solaris, with the cool stuff like Helix thrown in, and then shutoff 
just
>>>about all the insecure access by default...  Maybe make the daemons 
and
>>>such configure themselves a little bit better, and have it setup to 
run
>>>nice with ot without DNS.  Hmmm...  I do like some of the stuff 
that
>>>Solaris does, though, so it would be nice to have that, but the GNU
>>>stuff is really the biggy...  Still working on getting my Sparc to
>>>almost usable, by dropping TONS of GNU software on it:) (Sun ls is
>>>bad... sun shutdown is bad... sun ... you get the idea:)
> Hm. What's Solaris like?

Slow, expensive, like AIX.

>I am curious about S.u.S.E. 6.4. Best Buy has it for $30 with bunches 
of
>CD's, and, handling the box, a printed manual. :) Obviously, being 
rpm-based
>is a plus. Not being in English, natuerlich, is a minus. :) My German 
is
>VERY rusty!

Are there no SuSe users on this list?  Can someone please comment on 
the language issue and how bad it is in "current" releases.

>Debian is solid, but even slower than Red Hat. 2.2 "potato" has LDAP 
and has
>likely had it for ages but they are still a week or two from bundling 
the
>files into an offical dist. with boot floppies, &c. On the other 
hand, my
>2.1 "slink" is running potato's openLDAP 1.2.10-3 because another 
upgraded
>package wanted it (I'm currently installing packages from 2.2 ftp 
dirs). LVM
>0.8i-1 is in potato as well. I just have a slow connect that won't 
support
>net-upgrades in a timely fashion.
>And, of course, nothing commercial. (Though KDE will now be an 
offical .deb
>from now on.)

In a commercial enviroment (a company) it is very hard to avoid the 
RPM requirement.  Most commercial products expect RPM if not Redhat 
(or something very similair).  This non-technology problem (at least 
for me) limits the viability of Debain as a solution to anything.

> Let's all add on our comments on each dist and see what consensus 
says. :)

Redhat is good, but not even close to what I think a distrib could be. 
 The installer has been infallible for me but the purpose of a 
distribution is to bring things together, and it seems I have to bring 
more and more together myself as time goes on.  The config tools have 
not kept up with the advertised features, LDAP for example, they said 
they support it, but try and do that without manually installing RPMS, 
or try to find a single shred of documentation on how.

I've tried Mandrake but experienced some strange compatibility issues.