On Tue, 21 Dec 1999, Frank Rocco wrote:
> I'm a newbie, so please forgive my statements if they are incorrect. I was
> told that the Debian package was more stable and that their package
> management was better that RPM.
That's an over-generalization of things, and it's not quite valid in that
form.
Debian does have some advantages (and other disadvantages), and so does
their package manager. The nice thing about the Debian package manager is
that you can do something like "apt-get some-package.deb", and it will
install the package and all packages it depends on. This functionality is
currently missing in RPM, but it's being worked on.
One of the problems with Corel Linux is that it branched off a quite old
version of Debian, and therefore contains a lot of outdated packages that
don't have fixes that got in recently.
This includes stability fixes, security fixes and some features.
> Not sure what problem any outdated packages would cause. Can you clairify?
Well, you'll still run into problems with bugs that have been fixed months
ago. Maybe the worst of them is security bugs. There are at least 3 known
rootshell exploits in packages included in Corel Linux, so if you connect
a Corel Linux box to a network without fixing it up manually, anyone with
sufficient knowledge (or access to scripts written by people with
sufficient knowledge) can gain root access to your machine, and mess up
everything.
> CNET gave Corel Linux a best choice for Home and Red Hat for Business.
> If they did that only because Corel was eaiser to install, I don't think
> that was a good discision.
They picked it because of its installer, its documentation (can't comment
on that, I've used the downloadable version), and its user interface
(their patched KDE I mentioned before - it looks good, it's easy, but it's
a bit unstable).
The author of the article was apparently not aware of any of the other
issues, and installed it only on a machine where it worked well (I've
tried 4 machines, it worked on 2, failed completely on 2 others with a
slightly less standard setup (a notebook and a dual Pentium III with a
Matrox G400 VGA card)).
Just from looking at the installer and the customized user interface, I
think pretty much everyone would say Corel Linux is nice.
LLaP
bero
--
Nobody will ever need more than 640 kB RAM.
-- Bill Gates, 1983
Windows 98 requires 16 MB RAM.
-- Bill Gates, 1999
Nobody will ever need Windows 98.
-- logical conclusion
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