(warning: long, only-slightly-i18n-related email) On Sun, Sep 09, 2001 at 09:48:45AM +0100, Markus Kuhn wrote: > I've been using SuSE 7.2 with kernel 2.4.4 since mid-May and never had any > problems. I find SuSE 7 in general far more comprehensive than Red Hat 7, > which I have to use at work and which lacks a number of packages that I > got very used to on my home machine, starting with everyday trivialities > like xautolock and xearth. (By mere lines of source code, SuSE is around > 60% larger than Windows 2000 if you install everything!) Of course, then there's Debian, which has 7 or 8 thousand packages in its archive (which takes up around 35 GB on each Debian server if I remember correctly) and a very active and well-archived set of mailing lists. It has xautolock, xearth, and much more. All of this is very easy to install with apt and dselect, two very essential Debian packaging tools. They fetch and install all dependencies automatically, and, thanks to debconf, they (usually) prompt you for any answers that are needed. Many if not most Debian developers live outside the US, and many live in countries where English is not the primary language. A few examples of where Debian developers live are Sweden, France, Japan, Austria, and Croatia. Therefore there is much attention paid to i18n. There is even a project to translate the _descriptions_ of packages into other languages. The downside to Debian is that it has a horrible install process, which would frighten off almost any new user. This is even worse on non-x86 platforms. (However, Debian supports an amazing number of platforms; in the upcoming release, Debian is planning to support x86, m68k, ppc, alpha, mips big-endian, mips little-endian, ia64, hppa, and s390 at least.) It also doesn't have great documentation. On the other hands, the mailing lists are very friendly and helpful. SuSE is good, in the sense that it has an easy install process, and lots of graphical tools (the closest Debian comes to that is lots of character-cell GUIs, but if you want a graphical Debian-based system try Progeny), and there's a company to get help from if you feel more comfortable doing things that way. It also has a printed book of documentation if you buy the official version. However, it uses RPMs, which don't really have a good way to deal with dependencies other than yelling at you until you install them. Also, there are SuSE RPMs, Mandrake RPMs, Red Hat RPMs, etc., all of which are subtly incompatible. One nice feature of RPMs, though, is the fact that there is checking done when installing them to protect against tampering or file corruption. Debian can use RPMs as well as its native format, but one rarely needs to since so many things are packaged. Conclusion: Debian is not for the newbie who wants everything to be nice, pretty, easy, and Windows-like (although the upcoming release will include very nicely integrated KDE support, so you can have that too to some degree), but once you gain a certain level of proficiency, or if you want to gain that proficiency, it's very easy to maintain and use, and very well thought-out. Full disclosure: I am a Debian developer; i.e., I'm part of the Debian project. But I'm not getting paid one penny. I joined this past May because I liked it before I joined, not for some sort of compensation. - Jimmy Kaplowitz [EMAIL PROTECTED] / [EMAIL PROTECTED] P. S. - Mandrake seems to be the most popular choice for new Linux users. Two great advantages: wonderful install system including nondestructive partition resizer, and lots of graphical tools that work well if you use them exclusively. One big disadvantage: The graphical tools break and become useless if you modify the configuration files by hand. - Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
