On Fri, 2003-03-28 at 22:14, Andrew Jorgensen wrote:
Brian Beck wrote:
Maybe I ought to try to set up Debian again. If only I could figure it out.
I recommend Debian. KDE has their own debian packages that you can add to your sources.list. Check out <http://www.kde.org/download/>. Personally I recommend woody (stable), a lot of packages are a bit old, but I tried the testing version and I couldn't get the danged new installer to work properly. It really upset me, it's like they decided to take a huge step back.
I'm afraid I can't recommend Debian. I've used debian on various platforms, and I must say that I find debian to be extremely unpolished. True you can run KDE 3.1 or Gnome 2.2. on it, but underneath, I just find much to be desired. The unpolishedness of debian is really shows in the initscripts and configuration methods for things like network and X. There are 2 advantages to debian that I see. One is the ability to apt-get (from a huge network of official sites and packages) and the other is the ability to to have a consistant distro that runs on any platform linux has been ported to. SuSE and Redhat both now can use apt-get, so the first advantage isn't so big anymore.
Now if debian adopted some of the niceties of redhat's initscripts (like common functions for recording pid, displaying pass/fail, etc) which I think are SysV-isms, made the runlevels more useful (debian runs in runlevel 2, with or without X. Why not take advantage of the runlevel separation without forcing me to do it myself), and adopted a similar network configuration setup to redhat, then debian truly would be the best distro out there mainly because of the platforms it runs on. Now I could set modify everything myself and make it work like RedHat, but then every time I added a new package that had an init script, it would be all messed up.
Anyway, you probably can apt-get distupgrade to 8.2 if you change your apt sources.list file to point to the newer packages.
These are some good points that I haven't thought about before. They don't matter much to me though.
Startup scripts, for instance, are like boot managers to me, they're only there for a moment and then they don't matter much.
I do agree about the runlevel thing... or at least I would if I didn't think runlevels are generally not needed anyway. The way I see it my machine will rarely, if ever, need to run at a different level. In the two years or so it's been running I've never needed that feature, and in the /many/ years I've used RedHat and the like I've never found runlevels useful except that I can kill gdm/kdm and restart it by switching to 3 and back. That's probably the wrong way to do that anyway.
I've always said that FreeBSD is my favorite Linux distro :). I don't actually use FreeBSD right now. Mostly because it doesn't have apt and I really don't have the patience to compile everything.
I need to try gentoo when the semester is over.
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