Somethimes, the choice of distros gets into a religious war. A couple of
reasons I personally favor SuSE is that I can do virtually all my system
admin work using YaST. (Specifically YaST1). Additionally, YaST can be
used to check updates and patches. You navigate down to the Install
Packages menu. You are prompted for source. Select ftp, and the SuSE
ftp update site for your release is the default. The update site is grouped
into directories similar to the initial installation. Once in a directory, all
packages are shown with their status:
Blank - not installed on your system
o - You have an older package installed
i - This package is installed.
To download and install, simply check each of the boxes that you want,
press F10, and YaST will begin to download all the RPMs that you
checked off. For each RPM, you will be prompted to backup the currently
installed version when the installation begins.
There are two advantages here, first, you get a visual indication of what
patches are available based on what you have installed. And secondly,
you can download a bunch of RPMs in the same step. Saves some
testing. I have not used the other graphical RPM tools, such as the one
supplied with Gnome and KDE. The one on my Red Hat Alpha system
crashes.
The third reason I prefer SuSE is that it is the closest Linux distro to
Compaq's Tru64 Unix.
However, when asked about distros by new users, I sometimes
recommend Mandrake because it appears to be the most straightforward
to install.
I used to have Debian on my system, but I found that, while its package
manager is very thorough, the installation time for Debian in contrast to
the other distributions were significantly longer. I also found that Debian
somewhat lagged behind the other distros during the 2.2.x kernel times.
But I also prefer the Red Hat, SuSE and other distros' use of inittab to
control whether X should be loaded at startup.
Jerry Feldman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Associate Director
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org
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