On Tue, 2003-06-10 at 03:37, Joerg Mertin wrote: > Hi Folks, > > this request might be off-topic, but might not be. > For years now - I have always used Mandrake for Desktop Usage - always > bought the boxes, but RedHat for my home server - download edition. > > However - RedHat has become quite bad IMHO, especially the versions > 8.0/9.0 are quite ugly for an old Linux-user who started with kernel 0.9x, > and especially their company policy regarding customers & the OS movement. > > The reason I'm asking - is that I actually love the script based up2date > package, and the 7.3rh version - however - every month filling out their > questions etc. to get my demo-account active - is getting on my nervs. I > would pay for it - but don't know if paying for that, they will make as M$ > - stop support for the old versions etc. letting me hanging in the rain. > > So - what I require - is a Server operating system that is not using any > X-Interface for it's configuration. I would do everything by hand too - > but don't care if a curses-based UI exists. I also require an automated > Update system in place (I had written back in time one for automatically > updating RPM's, similar to up2date from rh), but it would be nice to have > that maintained by the distribution owner.
I do this I create a cron job that runs every 24 hours doing urpmi.update -a then urpmi --auto --auto-select. This takes care of all of the updates auto-magically for me. And, since it's a cron job it mails me the results. One note.... I also add main and contribs to my urpmi database and disable the cd's, this way if it needs anything new ... it can get it. I've been doing this for about 2 years now without a hitch, and my boxes are never more than a day out of date. Beats the heck out of up2date. 4 servers running MDK and 9 desktops (small office) all of them do this, all are kept up to date. In two years I've had one problem and it was caused by backhoe vs fiber incident that cut my connection to a site in my urpmi database. Just for Fairness YAST in SuSe can do this as well although I haven't used it. But out of all the distro's RH is the most troublesome to keep up to date. (and the one with the most updates too. Mostly self caused.) James > > Now - I do have a fairly well knowledge of Mandrakes capabilities, and for > my Desktop - I have no problem using it. However - a Server means for me, > that all my backups are going on it, it has to be reliable, needs to be > secured - and the system needs to be supported for at least a year or 2. > Mdk has gone the way of often updating the distribution - which is great > as long as I don't use it for my server... but I don't know as of yet of > an automated Security-fix installation option for mdk... > I had done my own operating system back in time - and could do it again, > but I'd first like to see if I can avoiding reinventing the wheel ... > > Anyone has a RPM based distribution to propose - that is up to date, > stable, light and easy to maintain ? > Preferably free, but I'm also willing to pay for it, if it's worth the > money... > > I would like to keep the RPM based distribution, as I have a very long > experience with RPM's (MD5 Checksums and PGP Signatures where actually > contributed from me to RedHat by the time of RedHat 2 beta), and I usually > also like doing RPM's, but don't like the way Debian packages are done > (reason I staid with RPM) Thanks for those... they are tremendously underused IMHO. Now if we can just get them to make boolean or available for dependencies I'd be in hog heaven. > > I'll have a new Server end of next-week, a Lex Light THIN Client 533 MHz > 860A-3R53 Fan-less with 3Lan 10/100MBits, 1WiFi port, 256MByte Ram and > 40GBytes Harddrive - barely bigger than an A5 format mini-computer - so > I'll have something to play with... > > So - any hints/tips welcome ... > > Cheers > > Joerg
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