[lug] mandriva 10.2 limited edition 2005

[Hugh Brown]

On Tue, 30 Aug 2005, Zan Lynx wrote:

> On Tue, 2005-08-30 at 21:49 -0600, Hugh Brown wrote:
> > I decided to give mandriva a whirl today.  I did the default install and a
> > bit more (there wasn't an Install Everything checkbox, which was
> > unfortunate).
> >
> > I then tried to build a tomcat related thing and noticed that autoconf and
> > automake weren't on the system.  I found a mirror that listed them in the
> > SRPMS for 10.2 and downloaded the source rpms.  Then I noticed that
> > rpmbuild was nowhere to be found.
> >
> > Is limited edition really that limited?
> >
> > The other interesting thing is that now when I go back to the mandriva
> > website, I can't find the free download area.
> >
> > So, can you only get a sane environment by paying them money or am I
> > missing something (sane == useful for non-newbie)?

So it turns out that I needed to add a urpmi repository.  It seems like I
search for about an hour, find nothing, post to the list, and find
something in 5 minutes.




>
> Somewhat unconnected rant follows.  Nothing against Hugh, he just
> triggered me. :)
>

I sometimes have that effect on people :)



> I've always considered Mandrake/Mandriva a desktop distro.  Why do
> people take a desktop Linux and try to build server software on it?
> That's trying to do two things (Development, Server) on a distro not
> designed for that.  Sure, you can do it, after enough pain, but whyyyy?
>

In my case, I was doing it because I was trying to support someone.
Someone else installed Mandriva and threw tomcat on it (but had some
difficulties due to general inexperience).  I was replicating their
environment in order to support them better.


> I consider Gentoo the ultimate development distro.  Compile with -g in
> CFLAGS and nostrip noclean in FEATURES, and you can debug as deep as you
> like, with all the source code.
>
> Debian or RedHat probably make the best servers, or derivative distros
> close to those two.
>
> I don't know where to rate SUSE since I never use it.
>
> But a desktop distro doesn't *care* about building code or running
> servers.  It should be all about the office tools, the video games, the
> music, the bling and the blang.

Over the past week, I've installed Mepis and Mandriva (in support of this
friend) and have noted that each distro has a "right way" to approach and
do things and found it a little frustrating.  Certainly some distributions
make certain functions easier or harder.  I've always just sort of taken
whichever distribution was given to me and made it do what I wanted it to
(sometimes with "enough pain").  However, I've felt that this is part of
what Linux use is about for me.  This doesn't work well for the consuming
masses though.

In looking through the software that was distributed with Mandriva, there
certainly is a lot of "server" related stuff (EVMS was in there).  So I
suspect it would work just fine as a server (at least as well as RedHat).
SuSE also has an enterprise server version that works just fine as a
server and they have a desktop version that could work as a server after a
few tweaks (I'm going off SLES 8 and SuSE 9.2 memories).

I guess I see multiple classes of "server" grade.  There's the hobbyist
running a simple website, there's the financial companies running also
sorts of db/computation stuff and there's everything in between.  In each
situation, one distro may be better suited than another, but I think
there's always a good bit of customization at every stage.

Hugh