On Thu, 25 Sep 2003, Mo McKinlay wrote:
> > But Debian is deficient in some significant ways too. I don't like the way
> > it interrupts the installation to ask about little things, like whether I
> > want a load monitor running in colour or monochrome. I don't like the way it
> > leaves lots of hardware for me to configure manually. I don't like the way
> > the stable distro is too old to work well with hardware that's shipping when
> > it's released (e.g. Debian 3.0 doesn't support the Intel ethernet adaptors
> > that were on the motherboards I purchased around the same time).
>
> Debian asks you when you first install it what level of prompting you'd
> like - right down to completely silent if you'd prefer it to stick with
> defaults and e-mail you when it's done.
The last time I noticed that was admittedly a few years ago now. That's
probably been fixed now. But whoever originally thought that those sorts of
questions were sensible at install time should read up on usability issues,
IMHO. ;-)
> The stable distribution can easily be run with a newer kernel. make-kpkg is
> very helpful in this.
In the scenario I described above, that unsupported ethernet device was the
only link that machine had to the outside world, bar CD/DVD, and so even
getting a new kernel on there was unnecessary hassle. My point was that RH8
was only released about two months after Debian 3.0, and it supported the
ethernet card flawlessly. From the RPM changelog for the 2.4.18-14 (actually
2.4.19pre10-ac1) kernel included in RH8, the e100 driver was last updated on
March 25 2002. Because Debian is a volunteer project, it's entirely
reasonable for its contributors to proceed at a pace that suits them.
Because RH was, at that time, being sold as a commercial product, it was
important for RH to look around at what hardware their distro was likely to
have to run on when it was released, and work to ensure compatibility
accordingly.
> The Linux kernel isn't tied to userspace in quite the same way as it is in
> FreeBSD, for example.
You haven't done much work with iptables or accelerated 3D, have you?
> In any case, running vendor-supplied kernels is usually a bad idea if
> you're serious about running a Linux-based system.
I argue the converse; I've been using Linux since 1995, and been able to
compile my own kernels since then. I still do on my "play" machines, or for
machines with bleeding-edge hardware that need similarly bleeding-edge
kernels (ACPI-configured laptops being a current example of this), but even
so, I'm modest enough to admit that Red Hat, Debian and SuSE (at least) all
have more kernel expertise in their respective organisations than I, and
probably more real-world experience of actual usage and deployment than
Linus or Marcelo. I've read through the patches that Red Hat apply to their
release kernels and most seem to be for important compatibility and
reliability issues. As a result, I recommend that users stick to
distro-supplied kernels (distro-supplied everything, in fact) unless they
have a specific reason to try upgrading to a newer version ("Support for
devices like the XYZ-123 you have is broken in 2.4.21. We think we've fixed
it in 2.4.22 - give that a try and let us know how you get on").
Best Regards,
Alex.
--
Alex Butcher Brainbench MVP for Internet Security: www.brainbench.com
Bristol, UK Need reliable and secure network systems?
PGP/GnuPG ID:0x271fd950 <http://www.assursys.com/>
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