On Thu, 28 Oct 1999, you wrote:
> Hello,
>
> The first distribution I ever used was Slackware. It's a great
> distribution, but Mandrake is better.
This could be the start of another religious war.... but
I will say this: if you are running a SERVER, specially
on the internet, you are crazy to run X-windows. Run the
whole thing from the command line, don't even install X.
Print remotely if you need to, and make sure all services
and things are stripped down.
This is common sense, Slackware, RedHat or Mandrake.
As for which is better....well, one is chocolate and
the other strawberry. Slackware is popular with academia,
and most books about Linux, specially the older ones
up to about 1997...1998... are geared towards Slackware.
Why? Because academics and long-time-Linux users dating
from the days when Slackware was the only game in town,
wrote those books. Newer books are coming out every day,
and most of them bypass Slackware. Slackware's great forte
is as a teaching tool. However, that said, if you know
what you are doing, it works well.
Remember that there is very little difference among the
distributions as far as what gets installed. Its the
installation and management processes that are different.
RPM vs Tarballs vs YAST etc. You pays your money and takes
your choice.
I ran Slackware in 1994-1995. Then RedHat came out and
I tried it. At first I did not like it. Then I did;
then Mandrake came out and seems to be a more responsive
company without their noses high and their heads in the
clouds. So I am using Mandrake now, first 5.3 then 6.1.
It is optimized for Pentiums, which is nice. Once in a
while I need a stripped Linux to run on a 386, a 486
or a MIPS and I go ahead and get something more appropiate,
usually one of the slim distros that fit on a floppy or
two.
That is what is nice about Linux. You can get the flavor
you want for your whim of the day. With Microsoft, there
are no choices. Try run NT Server on a 386 with 8 MB RAM.
Heeheheheheh.
--
Ramon Gandia ================= Sysadmin ================ Nook Net
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