On Tue, 18 Mar 1997, Leandro Asnaghi-Nicastro wrote: > What is the difference between Red-Hat, Debian and Slackware?
Slackware: One of the oldest distributions, and is showing its age. Created as a "bugfixed" version of SLS (Softlanding Linux System). Maintained by one person (Patrick Volkerding); home site: Walnut Creek CD-ROM (www.cdrom.com). No package tool available. Very slow to get updated; no interim upgrades. Considered by many "old-timers" to have "lost it" with the latest version (3.1), as most of the new parts are added "flash", with most known security problems left untouched. Red Hat: Available in two versions; shareware and commercial. Most of the software is the same; the commercial version used to have a commercial X server included. Maintained by several paid people; home site: Red Hat Software (www.redhat.com). Package tool available. Reasonably quick in bugfixes, sometimes slow in major updates (one of the last to have a version with a 2.x kernel). Versions available for DEC Alpha and SPARC. Rumored to be one of the easiest to set up (it and I simply don't get along). Was the base for the original Caldera Network Desktop (a commercial version of Linux, with many interesting additions). Debian: Maintained by over a hundred volunteers, each maintaining one (or several) package. Package tool available; able to use Red Hat packages. Hosted by CrossLink; home page (www.debian.org). Overall, one of the fastest with updates and bugfixes; in many cases, the program author is the package maintainer. Initial installation has had its share of "gotchas", mainly dealing with dependencies. (Don't install everything at once; install the recommended packages on the initial installation, then install a few packages at a time afterward.) Hope this helps.
