A good list. I like it. On Monday 10 December 2001 13:11, Justin Bengtson wrote: > > -----Original Message----- > > From: Mark Bigler [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] > > Sent: Monday, December 10, 2001 12:07 PM > > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > Subject: [EUG-LUG:480] Re: naive distro questions > > > > > > Justin, > > > > While the pains of your recent distro experience are fresh, you may > > want to post what it is you want from a distro and how the various > > distros you've tried have failed your expectations. > > reasonable. alright, here goes. > > 1. i want a distro with FHS compliancy. FULL FHS F**KING > COMPLIANCY. if something is out of place, it doesn't qualify. this > is contrary to my last e-mail, so please don't flame me. i figured > if everyone else could throw standards to the wind, i could too.
I know you aren't looking for excuses, but... The best I think anyone can say here is that all the distributions seem sincere in making this happen RSN. A stumbling block is the problem you encountered when considering doing you own FSH. Lot's of scripts and apps that have hard coded paths. Flushing out the side effects of moving both data and code is taking a lot of time. In the meantime legacy directorys and/or symlinks get around most of the problems (I know you don't want this "noise" in your system -- I hope things clean up soon). > 2. i want a distro which, it it does use a package manager, works. > that means that if a package has precompiled binarties, they should > work with whatever kernel version i have. and NO rpm's! personal > preference. i do not like the RPM system. deb isn't much better. > example : i installed xine. i tried to run xine. it does not play > anything, even with all dependencies met. Here comes the expected, but "xine works fine in my deb system." There could be a lot of things wrong: Group membership, resource conflicts or stale locks, etc. Starting an X app from a windowed shell will often get you access to the apps more interesting log messages, these can help isolate the problem (aside from the problem of the app not letting you know in a user understandable and GUI way what's wrong). Often, assuming that you're using a Debian kernel with a standard config, such problems may be due to apt-get only handling app dependancies and something apt-get did would have worked better if it had also handled "recommends" and/or "replaces" properly. But, even with a standard Debian kernel in place, there a still apps (like those dependent on lm-sensors) that require you to modify the kernel, but never mention it. I know, just more of why Debian isn't your first choice. > 3. for x, the distro should use gnome, not KDE. i have had a bad > experience with KDE (basically, it doesn't work. at all.) Oddly, this is something that Debian excels at. > 4. the distro should be linux. why? because i have not seen > another "alternative" OS that actually supports the nvidia chipset > (or vice-versa). > > 5. when i try to compile a program, and have met it's dependencies, > it should compile. see #1 above. this is my biggest greif with > linux these days. it probably has nothing to do with FHS or the > distro in question. it most likely does have to do with the > development system. either way, it really pisses me off. Again, I've found Debian source dependancies to work well. Clearly, Your Millage Has Varied. > 6. above all, the distro's installer should actually work. it > shouldn't forget important things like apt-utils (for debian) Wow. You got Debian to install without it including apt-utils!? > that's what i want out of a distro. As I said, a good list, just what a user should expect. Ignoring the FHS and Linux kernel requirements, BeOS came close, OS/2 and Geos tried, and Windows doesn't really (people just tend to think anything that goes wrong in Windows was their own fault). Keeping plugging and we'll get there.
