From: Shlomi Fish (shlomif_at_nonexisting.hamakor.org.il)
Date: Tue 08 Apr 2003 - 20:31:36 IDT
On Tue, 8 Apr 2003, Tzafrir Cohen wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 08, 2003 at 05:42:01PM +0300, Michael Sternberg wrote:
> >
> > Hello
> > I'm looking for advice which distro to chose for our new server.
> > Its going to be 2.4GHz CPU, 1Gb RAM, 2x80Gb hard disks machine.
> > Will be used as server for 10-15 developers connecting via X-Win32.
> > HDs will be probably used as software RAID.
> >
> > Candidates that I've thought about are:
> > RedHat, Mandrake, Debian and Gentoo.
> >
> > I mainly worked until now with Red Hat but little afraid of x.0
> > releases, do not want to wait for 9.1 and do not think RPM is the best
> > way to keep system updated. Same for Mandrake.
>
> Rpm is a system to track relations between packages. Rpm won't can tell
> you that it is safe (or not) to install a package, but it can't tell you
> from where to get the packages you need.
>
> Thus rpm is not a "way to keep the system updated". There are a number
> of systems that run on top of rpm and automatically resolve
> dependencies. Mandrake's urpmi is one of them. Connectiva's port of apt
> to rpm is another. apt/rpm is said to be working very well on redhat.
>
I should note that I have had a relatively positive experience working
with urpmi and friends on my Mandrake system at home. It's only a server
for itself and for the home laptop and definetely not a 100% uptime one.
Still, it never gets stuck or crushes, and is very reliable. I do run X
and KDE 3.1, and many daemons.
vipe.technion.ac.il runs an old version of Mandrake (8.1) and has an
excellent uptime. It's a dual PPro machine. Mandrake is targetted at the
desktop and comes with a whole slew of bells and whistles. But the core
Linux system is still there and it's very usable from the command line.
Sometimes installing updates break, and I need to download them manually
and install them using rpm --force or something similar. Maybe the
situation will improve in the future. Mandrake is maintained by a large
group of workers and volunteers, so it's hard to make sure everything is
done exactly right in the first time.
> >
> > Debian I've never seen. Looks like it have the best package managing
> > with this misterious apt-get utility. How difficult it will be to move
> > from Red Hat environment to Debian ? How automated Debian is ? How updated
> > its packages are ?
>
Debian is quite different than RedHat or Mandrake from what I saw. The
packages names can be completely different and I had to search a bit to
find the openssl development package when working there once. apt is very
nice, but urpmi and apt-rpm are very similar (everyone copied from
Debian). I believe Gentoo's system is a bit better because packages can be
configured in some way and then packages will be resolved according to the
configuration options. (I.e: if you configure vim with ruby support, then
ruby will be installed). This feature originated in the BSDs, actually.
I had little experience working on Debian. Note that there is a
misconception that it is the only "true" free as in speech distribution.
That is hardly the fact because the core system of RedHat, Mandrake,
Connectiva and many others is free as well.
I complained about it to RMS during his visit to Israel, and he said that
there still is a point, because with other distribution a user can
accidently install non-free programs, which is harder in Debian. Free
software purity is so infuriating. A vendor is kind enough to make the
installer, system tools, package manager, etc. free software, and you are
not happy because he lets you install pine, netscape 4.x or qmail if you
so desire? You might as well throw the baby along with the water.
Hmmm... I complained about it enough already. Maybe I should let it be.
> The recent "stable" was release about 9 monthes ago. So it's not
> ancient, but it lacks some of the latest bleeding-edge packages.
>
> It also includes a large variety of software packed as debian packages.
> Thus chances are you won't need much software that is not part of the
> distro. This allows the package-management system to work well.
> Badly-packaged packages will wreck havoc in any package-management system.
>
> So you probably know what my biased opinion is ...
>
I don't, but maybe I did not read between the lines.
My opinion is that either Mandrake or Debian would be fine. I'll go for
Mandrake (after taking some time to remove the desktopish features), but
it's just that I'm used to it, and am not too fond of Debian's minimalism.
> --
> Tzafrir Cohen +---------------------------+
> http://www.technion.ac.il/~tzafrir/ |vim is a mutt's best friend|
> mailto:tzafrir_at_technion.ac.il +---------------------------+
>
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----------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish shlomif_at_t2.technion.ac.il
Home Page: http://t2.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/
There's no point in keeping an idea to yourself since there's a 10 to 1
chance that somebody already has it and will share it before you.
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