Re: Distro's that dont come with proper lib's

[John Corey <whoop@mtco.com>]

Steven Pritchard wrote:
> 
> Tim Grossner said:
> > Ok...Fine...I will, grudgingly, try another distro...But not RedHat. Anyone
> > here got a turbolinux CD I can borrow tonight?
> 
> May I ask why not Red Hat?
> 
> In any case, if you want to give SuSE a try, I still have some copies
> of the last version.  (These CDs are from last October, so they're not
> very out-of-date.)  Call me if you want one.  (Of course, I also have
> Red Hat 5.2 that I could probably loan out.  :)
> 
> Steve

I just tried Suse 5.2 here recently.  The install was very nice, even
snazzy.  I haven't gotten around to getting X going, but so far I'm
impressed.

As for RedHat, from my experience talking to some anti-RH people, there
is some strong animosity towards rpm.  Much of it is the dependence many
new people have on binaries, losing the good ol' tradition of
compiling.  This is just one of those growing pains people will have to
get over.  Linux isn't any longer the OS of geeks who know C and can fix
broken Makefiles and everything themselves.  With the growth, there are
some people that just want to have a good workstation, and be able to
keep current and upgrade as painlessly as possible.

Personally, I don't mind the distribution.  Linux is Linux.  But then
again, if something goes wrong, I know how to wander through all the
config files and track down errors.  Slackware is fine, but back in the
old days of 1.1 kernels, I always hated doing a "make install" blindly. 
I kept asking myself, what am I going to do if I want to get this
program off my system?  At first I'd keep the logs of the makes, but I
got tired of it after a while. :)  My system grew and grew until I ran
out of space.  Then I'd buy a new hard drive, and reinstall Linux, copy
over what I really wanted from the old drive, and format it too.  The
system was fine for me, I could live with it.

Deep down I was still a Slackware kinda guy.  I started with it, but
really the system was my own mixture.  I had installed so many programs,
libraries, etc it resembled very little the Slackware I put on from
massive numbers of floppies.

When I finally tried RedHat, around 3.something, I was quite impressed
how smooth the installation was.  But after that, I still hacked around,
installed programs I wanted, etc.  After a while, I decided to get to
know this rpm program even back then people were speaking fouly about. 
It was a life saver.  I could quickly look up in it's database what
package a file came from, install, deltee packages.  I was going through
all the packages RedHat installed by default, reading their
descriptiong, deleting what I didn't care about, making a much leaner
system.  Wow, exciting, this thing could go places.

A little after Maximum RPM came out, I saw it at a Barnes & Noble (also
available free in Postscript format).  I picked it up and decided it was
about time I learned how to make my own RPMs.  Within maybe 30 minutes I
was up and running with it.  Now, everything I compile is wrapped into
an RPM.  I can control where config files go, ensure that every little
tidbit is removed on uninstall.  It's really a nifty packager.

Wow, that's a lot of words...  I guess what I'm trying to say is, "Can't
we all just get along?"  I guess I don't understand the Distribution
Holy War people.  Pick a distribution and go learn as much as you can,
and spread the good word about Linux.

That is all.

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