[lug] debian

[Nate Duehr]

Peter Hutnick wrote:

> Debian focuses on Freedom and (extreme) stability.  These are admirable,
> but make it hard on a guy who is hoping to run contemporary hardware and
> have it "just work."

Agreed.  It's great for stock hardware running servers.  REALLY GOOD. 
Desktop's a pain in the rump to get set up, but great after that.

> I like Red Hat.

I don't, but they still have the easiest to get going distro for desktop 
use on newer hardware... sigh... I hear good things about others, but 
haven't gone there yet.  My latest "toy" machine is the Athlon 2500 that 
cranked away overnight last night on building KDE (what the heck, tired 
of Gnome... will try KDE for a while...) at home last night... we'll see 
how it fires up and plays tonight.

With RedHat... RPM dependency-hell, and no really good clean way to get 
from one major release to another on RedHat have always been achille's 
heels.

I know most of the group uses the "have /home in its own partition and 
reinstall" upgrade method with both RH and KRUD, from previous 
discussions -- and I find that to just be silly -- RH could focus more 
effort on upgrades... they just don't.  Where the heck is their ReiserFS 
support in the installer too?!  Oh well...

The CD upgrades sometimes work, more often than not some config file 
changes format, there's no warning and the daemons on the box blow up 
nicely after the "upgrade".  :-)

The sheer number of silly avoidable exploits found recently in so many 
common daemons has made patching production internet-connected machines 
quite a chore.  Then the up2date/RHN SSL key expiring didn't help much 
-- always nice to have to copy crud to every box manually and install it 
so you can fix your automated update tool! ;-)

There are days when I figure OpenBSD is starting to look better and 
better for webservers... heh.  Nahhhh...

Lately I've been teaching a lot of non-Unix people in both ham radio 
circles and just local friends about Linux and they're all quite 
appalled at the whole "update virtually daily" stuff that's been going 
on for months now... they're not impressed.

They've all heard for years that "Linux is better" but the recent bumper 
crop of silly exploits really has made Linux look a lot like Windows 
boxen -- if you strive to keep both types patched and up to date.  It's 
kinda sad.

Of course, I never tell them Linux is "better" I just tell 'em it's good 
stuff and fun, and maybe they'll like it.  They can decide what they 
want to run on their own.

I'm just passin' along what they give me grief about on the phone!  Of 
course, one of the "punishments" is they force me to go watch this again 
and laugh at myself regularly...

http://www.ubergeek.tv/switchlinux/  .... LOL!

"You have to config it..."

-- 
Nate Duehr, nate at natetech.com