RE: Why use Debian? Why not Red Hat?
One reason is pretty installation. IMHO, RedHat has more eye candy. It
starts up with a more intuitive install and gives a general user what they
are looking for. Apps, X/MS like interface. Some networking stuff. Great
book in every store, most with CDs. Great documentation on getting Samba
running (books required :( ).
For administrators, debian appears to be the odds on favorite. After the
failed floopy install attempt, I installed from CD (long story).
Installation went much smoother and when I was done (after running dselect)
I could not only ping but ftp and web browse apache. I assure you this was
no fault of my own :) ! Nice server in a box installation !
My comments while they are fresh in my mind and before the failed attempt
and successful attempt mentally run together more.
Debian:
1. Install by floppy then CD didn't work
2. Said it would make my HD bootable, didn't. I still boot from floppies so
if anyone can tell me where to look to change this... It's not bad because
I almost never have to reboot :)
3. It appears everything installed, but didn't. You have to run dselect to
install mandatory packages after you have installed OS ? This wouldn't be
so bad if it told you this during install. Maybe it did and I missed it !
4. You have to run dselect. Ouch ! For a nice installation, this was
somewhat painful. Not to mention it is very unclear which CD does what. I
tried to tell it I had two CDs and I put the appropriate CD in. It
complained about not finding packages like Contrib. Maybe it doesn't ship
with it. In any event, I selected and said install and it chuncked away and
away and failed to install. I had the wrong CD in. I tried it with the
other one and everything seemed to work.
Bottom line for me
If you want a workstation loaded with semi-useful apps, choose redhat. If
you want to play, choose redhat. If you are going to use this for your main
computer with no server intentions, I would choose redhat. If you have
bizaar hardware, redhat (I believe) has more drivers. Redhat has more
packages but this may be an arguement for alien.
If you want a network or internet server, choose debian or you'll
unfortunately wish you had.
Just my intial opinion of Debian and past(pre 6.0) opinion of redhat. For
what it's worth, my server is using debian.
paul
> -----Original Message-----
> From: David Teague [mailto:dbt@elentari.cs.wcu.edu]
> Sent: Friday, September 03, 1999 3:53 PM
> To: Adam C Powell IV
> Cc: debian-user@lists.debian.org
> Subject: Re: Why use Debian? Why not Red Hat?
>
>
> On Fri, 3 Sep 1999, Adam C Powell IV wrote:
>
> > "Richard E. Hawkins" wrote:
> >
> > > Damon dabbled,
> > >
> > > > Seeing Debian is such an internet-centric (ie., apt)
> distribution, it
> > > > would be nice if you could install the whole thing with one
> the one or
> > > > two boot disks (I'm sure you can with redhat). Even if the
> boot disk had
> > > > a little FTP client (like wget or curl), so you could
> switch to a VT and
> > > > put them on that newly made EXT2 partition.
>
> How does zero floppy install stack up?
>
> I installed my latest Debian slink from a single CD with no floppy
> at all. In fact the floppy did not work at all, a fact I didn't
> discover until much later. Once the system was up, I pulled all the
> updates off the net.
>
> --David
> David Teague, dbt@cs.wcu.edu
> Debian GNU/Linux Because software support is free, timely,
> useful, technically accurate, and friendly.
>
>
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