Hi! Just some comments after reading the first posting and others. My english is not perfect, nor I reply exactly to this thread.
I like Debian/Linux as it is. It is a wonderfull distribution allowing me to get every time when "I" want an update via Internet. (And not when others think I should do it) Based on the Slink CD's I upgraded to Potato with success. I'm not interested in shareware or other half-professional software. I want a flexible system I can administrate with help of full documentation, by scripts or in plain text files. (Not this registry-stuff where nobody knows even what you could put in there) I don't need a GUI surface, the basic X-Windows system is ok. All this CDE, KDE stuff and other things don't make me more productive. I'm using Netscape and StarOffice, Tkdesk, fte, ae, etc.. This system allows me to choose what combinations of software I want to use at home. I will not install the sound and multimedia things, if I need a lot of noise I can switch on the ghetto-blaster of my doughters or the TV. In the office I build a firewall-system based on this distribution. And soon we will try to copy our oracle database from a NT machine to a Debian/Linux based system. Having eliminated the Exchange-Server and using a D/L based system would give me better sleep. Even now I use an old pc to examine the log files of the exchange server and our Cisco-router. All doc- and conf-files I can print out on paper and document the system. I have it really under control. Not somebody else tells me that I can be shure that it's the best system. Starting in 1976 I wrote my first horrible 10 lines program in basic on an DEC PDP8A. 1977 I had to learn to program a 8080 or 8085 I don't remember, school is over. In my buisness live I saw DOS, WIN 3.1, OS/2, Win95 etc. Novell, WARP, NT Server. More and more nice surfaces more colors etc... I had to introduce a order-processing system with Win-Clients. I can tell you, the humans are still producing the same idiotic letters, offers etc. as the years before. But the knowledge gets more and more hided behind graphical surfaces, nice fonts (wysiwyg) and overloaded functions in word processing or spreadsheet programs. Network software is sold by many companies and administrated by many specialists who know nothing else than MS. And even they don't know what they are really doing, because they have not the money to pay for all this certificates, documentation, subscriptions etc ... Here we have a nice Debian/Linux system, easy to administrate, if you understand the docu, if you realy read it. For free ! Even the mysterious RFC's you can find. Excelent HOWTO's, even for me understandable and with a real practical background. I learned to program our cisco router reading the ipfwadm and ipchains docu and relevant HOWTO's delivered with D/L. I learned what means to be a system administrator, because now I know what I don't know. (I'm in sales, just because of my electronics background I administrate our system, when there is time left) If you can not find software or docu you like to have, you are free to get it from another source in internet. Be happy not to get a black-box system with ALL-IN. I have a deep respect for this people who make DEBIAN/LINUX to a free GNU system, avaliable to everybody, free of charge, against all commercial pressure arround. Michael Steiner --- Michael Steiner, Minorgasse 35, A-1140 Vienna, Austria
