[PLUG] It's free as in air and speech, not free as in beer.

Mark Morgan lemming at attbi.com
Wed Aug 21 22:02:36 UTC 2002


Jeme A Brelin wrote:
> Quite frankly, when I see these Debian v. Red Hat discussions on this
> list, I am stunned by how few people actually support Red Hat on technical
> merits.  Usually the argument is simply reduced to "Diff'rent strokes for
> diff'rent folks" and the Red Hat users urge the discussion dropped.  I've
> yet to hear anyone argue that Red Hat is actually superior to Debian in
> any way.  Instead, Debian supporters are branded and their arguments
> dismissed as zealotry.

I haven't checked the latest Debian, but I would say Red Hat is easier 
to install and worked with all my hardware.  This may of changed with 
the woody release.

I've been playing around with different distributions on my Sony Vaio 
PCG-F580.

Ones I've gone through the entire install and used for at least a few 
days: SuSe 7.3, SuSe 8.0, Redhat 7.3, Mandrake 8.2, Gentoo 1.2

Of these, only Redhat installed correctly.  Mainly due to my pcmcia NIC. 
SuSe needed tweaking of a conf file before it would work, but probably 
needed the second least amount of work to get running the way I wanted 
it too. (For some reason, Mandrake gave me trouble, but I don't recall 
what now.)
On the other hand, having the Redhat site busy for updates all the time 
means I haven't done any patches. (Though, I'm betting I'm missing some 
mirror...)
With SuSe, that was easy.  Their update tool works flawlessly for me. I 
happen to like SuSe a lot and will be keeping my main server running it 
for some time.

I'm going to go back and load Gentoo again.  I found that distribution 
to be a fun delve into the nuts and bolts. Plus I do find running at the 
cutting edge to be a bit of a thrill.  The only reason I threw Redhat on 
was because I knew it would be a quick load and I was pressed for time 
when I reloaded. (I had a couple problems with X and sound. Just enough 
to be a pain.)

I might try Debian again just for to check it out again.

-Mark





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