Re: Problems with Redhat 9

On Fri, Apr 11, 2003 at 10:57:36AM -0500, Carl Wilhelm Soderstrom told me:
> I disagree on that point; I would say I can build a Debian system faster
> than a RH system (kickstart nonwithstanding); mostly because with RH it's
> more trouble to install packages, and you need to cut away a lot of cruft
> that they install by default.

Maybe for a base system, but what if you need to build a user friendly
workstation. If you want to compete with RH or Mandrake you will need the
latest Gnome or KDE. I have not tried, but I hear that KDE3 is in testing and
there is still no Gnome2 support in the base OS tree.

If I was building some server flavor then maybe.

> I've usually found that it's not impossible to get things to work with
> Debian tho. 

Not impossible, but maybe a crude hack which does not get vendor support.

> Most of the 3rd-party commercial RPMs that I've seen are for device drivers
> or the like; and won't work if you don't have the default kernel for that RH
> version. 
> since I almost never have a stock RH kernel on a box that I'm working on;
> it's usually necessary to (at best) fiddle with getting the driver installed
> anyway.

About 7 months ago I purchased a LSI Logic FC RAID system. Very high quality
(approx $65K) to be used for a Linux NFS/SMB/ATalk server. They would not
support any kernel besides the default RH 7.2 kernel. I was able to use it
with the latest (at the time of the build) 7.3 kernel, but they told me they
would not support it. Also, it would not work on a kernel.org kernel
(compiled, but it it was very unreliable).

> but maybe my experiences and environment are different from yours. :)

There are some proprietary compilers (ie. IFC) that are distributed in RPM,
backup client (Veritas) is only supported under RedHat (it may work, but it
will be a hack, and the vendor only supports RedHat like systems). Even the
Santricity RAID software is only RPM for RedHat...

Once again, you /may/ be able to hack all of these to work, but why? There is
a supported system.

Once again, I believe that this niche can be fit by a community solution.

> I always look at desktops as being completely separate from the underlying
> Unix OS. An administrator will always have to customize them in a buisness
> environment; so I don't see that it matters what the default setup is, nor
> what package scheme you use (rpm, deb, inst, tgz, autopkg...).

The desktop is a level higher then the OS, I agree.

But in actuality, I don't modify the desktop at all from a standard base
RedHat install when I build a desktop. Although, it is not like I am in a
business enviornment... :)

> for the home user; RH may be a win, because it gives you lots of choices,
> rather than requiring you to know what you need ahead of time. So I'll say
> it has a place there. (not to say it doesn't have a place in other
> situations tho).

Agreed.
-- 
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