Re: Why use Debian? Why not Red Hat?

[Alvin Oga <alvin@Mail.Linux-Consulting.com>]

hi ya patrick/george

> I graduated from Red Hat to Debian twice. I was hard-headed and did not
> learn the first time ... gave it a second chance. I came back to Debian.
> 
> The ONLY thing Red Hat has is an easy install ... upkeep of a Red Hat
> system is a nightmare.

install on rh ain't that trivial.... lots of gotchas and oopps... like
other distro... just need to watch it...
	- a trivial install would be:
	* fdisk the disk/format/mount it
	* dd if=/working_distro of=/target-disk
	* tweek the network info -- no way for it to know your domain/ip# in advance
	* autodetect your SVGA/X11 config info
	* boot_it and it should work 

whether you like one distro over another would depend on...
-- whether you can compile the linux kernel on the distro you just bought...
	( some recent version cannot compile its own kernel that is on the cd )
-- which apps you like ....already on the cd you get
	- which hardware you have...some distro does NOT support some hardware...
	- elm, pine, ssh, tripwire, 
	- egcs, java, 
	- wordperfect, staroffice, applix, mysql, oracle, sybase, etc
-- how you want to upgrade/patch/maintain it
	- the nightmare or just let rsync/mirror/raid/home_brew do its magic

- if you are local ( santa clara - silicon valley ) ...stop by....
 	have these silly boxes for poking around...
	-
 	rh-5.x/6.0 slackware-3.6/4.0, suse-6.2, deb-2.1/2.2, caldera-2.2, tl-3.6, etc

have fun linuxing
alvin


> On Wed, 1 Sep 1999, Patrick Kirk wrote:
> 
> > I'm not a techie so this is a user's perspective.  Red Hat is just as free
> > as Debian so there's no issue there like there is with SuSE and Caldera.
> > There are far more Red Hat users out there and lots of RPMs.  So give it a
> > try and decide for yourself.  I use Debian because its so easy to keep it
> > stable, because I think apt-get is way way easier than rpm and because the
> > support offered by this list is great.
> > 
> > Patrick