On Sun, 2002-03-10 at 05:33, Hari Yellina wrote: > > Hi. > > I am just wondering , why u guys are using mandrake over other linux flavour > . Can u guys tell me the advantages, > > Thank you, > > Hari Yellina
Hari, Back in the "old" days, there was Slackware. I loved the Slack experience; but there were some problems. One main dig was that any tarball packages that I installed could not be uninstalled, except by manual deletion. There was no such thing as "dependencies", or tracking of package pieces by database, or anything like that. As you can imagine, this got old fast; Slack distro installs could get foobarred in no time flat. Well, in the time it would take to install a crappy tarballed application, actually. Then you'd spend half a day tracking down uncensored library updates. I got involved with Red Hat in the corporate arena in my second unix sysadmin job. I had been prejudiced against Red Hat previous to this time, because for one thing just the name itself pissed me off. However my technical director had standardized our shop on the distro, so I made it my business to know the system inside and out. I really fell in love with the RPM package system, and although I heard many legends about apt and Debian, we never considered them a player; partly because there was no corporate infrastructure that supported either us as customers or others as employees in the linux world, and partly because we never could get a valid demonstration of why exactly apt was superior to the rpm package manager. The Red Hat package manager was a sysadmin's dream; it allowed for consideration of upgrades with regard to wether you were going to "break" something or not; in other words, if two packages used the same libraries, but different versions of those libraries, the rpm install routine informed you of that fact. This was a very fulfilling experience for a Slackware graduate. A year into the job, although I became a Red Hat lover, I began to see shortcomings of the distro. For one thing, all the damn packages were only optimized for an 80386 processor. That meant that all the microprocessor instructions that had been added since the advent of the 386 were missing from every Red Hat RPM package in existence, since all they had were 386 optimized packages. So supposing you invested in a Pentium 2 processor box, some of your money was thrown to the wind if you used Red Hat, since the next generation abilities of the processor were like tits on a boar hog. I then started looking around for something else; I knew about source rpm packages, did NOT want to lose the Red Hat package manager, and had seen SRPM's optimized for 586. I wondered by chance if it had occurred to anyone to produce a RPM based distro on 586 optimized RPM packages. That day, a shining light broke from the heavens, blasting through the ceiling of our shop, and the Mandrake distro dropped right into my lap; a gift from Heaven itself. (actually I found them with a web search; that just sounded better.) I laboriously ftp'd the distro in off the t1 line (had trouble getting bandwidth at the source sites)and proceeded to install Mandrake on one of the AMD boxes. After that it was like a nitrous oxide scene from "The Fast and the Furious". That box was blazing fast. Since then, I've not looked back or to either side. The incredible install and hardware detection routines in Mandrake, for me, have been only a big extra bonus. Cheers, LX _________________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com
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