[lug] SUSE- comments

[celttechie (Brian Jarrett)]

> 2- I also liked the 'prefab' installs available, or the easily navigated
> 'do-it yourself'. I always thought RH's was a nightmare to try to go
through
> and install selected packages. I dreaded that part. I really like the
> 'automatic' feature that will install other packages as needed.

That's good to hear.  I've just tried installing Slackware, Mandrake and
Debian within the last few weeks to see how easy it was to update a few
things like KDE and XFree86 and also install new apps like Gnucash and (most
important of all) VMware.  My main problem was with package installers, or
lack thereof.  I suppose I should really just learn how to install software
by compiling it myself, but I was hoping to find a distro that did a good
job of managing packages.

I really like Debian's capability to specify dependencies and indicate the
difference between required and recommended packages.  I also liked it's
ability to automatically install the required packages if it new where they
were.  My problem with Debian, though, is that alot of the software I've
been looking at don't have debian packages available.
I didn't spend a lot of time with Slackware's pkgtool (sp?) but it wasn't
intuitive and I couldn't get it to behave properly.
All of the RPM installers in the Mandrake distro worked pretty much the
same.  I was _really_ wishing that one of them had the ability to install
other packages listed as dependencies.  I get frustrated when I have to try
and locate 12 other packages, which may have their own dependencies to sort
out, just to get the one I want installed.
IMHO all of these distributions do a good job of initial installation, but
adding software after loading a distro can be a pain.  I'm encouraged to try
Suse, however.  (What does it use for packages, though?)  I'm betting that
no distro has the silver bullet for painless installs of Linux software, but
maybe I can get close.  I'm pretty sure I'll just have to learn more about
compiling software from the source.

Another good idea would be a package standard among all distros.

Brian




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