[PLUG] Fedora change...

AthlonRob AthlonRob at axpr.net
Tue Nov 11 22:37:02 UTC 2003


On Tue, 2003-11-11 at 22:09, Michael C. Robinson wrote:

> I don't like the idea of getting a version 1 system.

The version 1 system, as I understand it, has a longer history than most
distributions released today.

If Gaim hits version 1.0 tomorrow, does that mean it's an unstable thing
that was just written?  I think not.  :-)

> I really liked slackware, seems in later years though that
> it ran into problems.  

Well, I only started using Slackware in the later years, so can't
comment on how much it's changed, really.  It's still winning converts
every day.  In the beginning, Slackware was the distro to use, and many
folks used it.  Then the others came along and people migrated away from
it to the point it was nearly a relic.  Today it stands at around the
4th or 5th most popular distribution according to most polls I've seen.

It's winning folks back.

> How do you network install slackware
> anyways?  

Very carefully.  <g>

It's not difficult to build a Slackware disk that supports installation
by FTP - a friend did just that for Slackware 8.1 a while back in an
hour or two, utilizing the ftpfs module.

You could do a similar thing with smbfs.

Just us a pre-mounted directory.

Or, use NFS.  If you have an NFS server already, there's configuration
support for it right in the Setup script.  :-)

> What I've heard is that debian is the 
> engineer's system of choice over Slackware.  

I won't comment too much on Debian - I really dislike it, but haven't
used it except to bootstrap other distributions, so won't go too far
into that.

> Has package
> tool been fixed?  It was broken in Slackware eight.

I beg to differ - Slackware 8.0 was the first one I installed.  PKGTOOL
was far from broken.  How was your pkgtool broken in 8.0?

If you mean it didn't do dependency tracking - that's by design, it
wasn't broken.

Today, if you want dependency tracking with Slackware, along with an
Up2Date-like service, there's Swaret.  I understand Slapt-get can be
modified to do dependency tracking, as well.  I'm not much of a binary
package kinda guy, though.

> I'm surprised Redhat doesn't do OEM direct to ordinary people.
> Setting a system up for a customer choosing the hardware can
> save money on remote support.  This service if priced right 
> would be welcome by many people.  At least the customer 
> wouldn't be getting XP.

That might be nice.  But they'd be filling a niche already filled by how
many other distributions?

> Does anyone have initial reactions to Fedora.  Maybe Mandrake
> would be a better choice.

I think Mandrake and Fedora have different paradigms.  From everything I
know about Fedora (which, honestly, is very little), it isn't much like
Mandrake.  Mandrake is unstable, bulky, but extremely easy to use for
the less-computer-literate out there.  Fedora is closer to a power
user's system, geared more towards server use, if I understand things
correctly.  Mandrake isn't geared towards a server setup, and I'd
question the competency of anybody who wanted to set up Mandrake in a
production server environment.

Rob





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