On Tue, 7 Nov 2000, Jeffry Smith wrote:
>> Hardware detection is basically non-existent.
>
> That's been my major complaint with Debian, and it's a one-time complaint.
The "you only install once" argument is a major fallacy, and it is time to
burst that bubble.
I work for a systems integrator. Half of our business is doing installs.
The machines are all similar enough to automate using Kickstart, but not close
enough that a hard disk image will work.
Even if you don't do several installs a month, reinstalling a home system
isn't unheard of. Maybe you had a disk crash (like I just did). Maybe you
were fooling around as root and hosed the system good.
And even if you rule *that* out, do you ever change things? Buy new
hardware? Remove old hardware? Then you perform the operations that Red Hat
and similar distros automate.
If I upgrade the network card in a Red Hat box, it will detect it at boot,
configure the kernel module(s), and offer to migrate the network configuration
from the old card for me. (With Windows NT, BTW, you have to redo the entire
network stack.) This is Very Cool(TM).
Debian will, at best, fail to load the services that depend on the old
hardware.
>> Debian doesn't seem to have caught on to the idea of kernel modules.
>> The installed boot kernel reminds me of the "kitchen sink" kernels of the
>> Linux 1.x days ...
>
> Haven't had a problem here. It doesn't seem to do that for me, but
> then again, I rebuilt the kernel ...
Well, duh. :-) Of course if you build your own kernel, you won't have
problems with the stock kernel they install. :-)
> Hadn't noticed particular slowness of dpkg or apt-<whatever>.
It wasn't really significant, but it was decidedly noticeable. On the same
hardware, Debian with 600 MB of packages took longer to find a package owner
by file than my old Red Hat system with twice as many packages. On modern
hardware, I guess this isn't a problem, but it kind of made me wonder what it
would be like on an old 486...
> I actually find (given that I have RH on my laptop, debian at home), that
> debian works better. rpmfind et al inevitably don't find the package I
> want, or tell me I have the latest installed, when I KNOW there's a newer
> package out there.
Are you using the rpmfind that Red Hat supplies? That might be your
problem. Red Hat's source list is much narrower than the "real" rpmfind one.
Remove Red Hat's version and install the one from the rpmfind.net home site.
Wipe out your $HOME/.rpmfind file, too. This will cause it to recreate it's
package catalog. This makes a huge difference for me.
> Also, despite the --upgrade on rpmfind supposed to be grabbing everything,
> it doesn't. I end up watching the rpm output, figuring out the missing
> package, downloading that, trying again, etc.
I've had that happen, but I also had it happen with Debian. I chalk it up
to errors on the part of the packagers.
> One nice thing about Debian is the work the volunteers do on building
> the packages to ensure that the dependancies are spelled out
> correctly ...
<SARCASM> Yeah, like the ones for Pine. </SARCASM>
(Sorry. As far as monolithic applications go, I spend 90% of my time in
Pine and Netscape. The pain needed to get Pine to install on Debian did not
impress me *at all*.)
> I've upgraded to "Woody" the current "unstable" branch, and have yet to
> find it "unstable" - it seems rock-solid.
One thing I could buy about Debian is that their releases have a reputation
for being more consistently stable. Compare this to, e.g., Red Hat, where an
x.0 version is rather like a warning label. ;-) Of course, when you take two
years between releases, you'd better be able to get it right....
[RE: A feature Red Hat has that Debian doesn't. ]
> Should be possible to adjust this, since both are GPL.
What's the point of spending all my time porting features from Red Hat to
Debian? I might as well use Red Hat. The whole, entire, complete and total
point of a distribution is to make my life easier. Otherwise, I'd just
compile everything from sources, like Paul. ;-)
> Part of this is the debian philosophy of not defining what the run levels
> mean, but leaving it up to the sysadmin.
"If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice."
-- Neil Peart
They have to choose *something* for runlevel defaults. If a package runs in
all runlevels by default, or none, that is still saying something about what
the runlevels mean.
I can and do redefine the runlevels on my Red Hat boxen. If the defaults
work, great, and if not, I'm going to have to change it anyway.
> I've defined what I want them to be, and configured it accordingly.
See? What's the difference between that, and redefining it on a Red Hat
system? Answer: None. Except that for 90% of the cases, the defaults work
just fine.
Sorry, but this claim of not defining what the run levels mean is bogus.
> Then again, even with RH, I often manually changed things around from the
> default.
I'll let that speak for itself. :-)
> Part of that problem is doing it in a clean way for upgrades (they take
> non-breaking upgrades seriously).
I would imagine you could do that with dependencies. A lot of Red Hat RPMs
require an exact version of a supporting package to install properly. For
example, package "netscape-navigator 4.75" requires "netscape-common = 4.75".
But I don't have to install "netscape-navigator" to install "netscape-common".
> I've always used the X XF86setup program anyway, as all of the "official"
> ones from RH, Mandrake, etc, barfed on my S3 Trio3D board, so I can't
> comment (other than I won't buy an S3 board again).
Interesting. One of the things that has consistently impressed me about Red
Hat is their ability to detect the video board properly. (I just wish the
rest of their Xconfigurator's setup didn't suck so much.)
> I found I personally hated SuSE's YAST / YAST2 (not saying it was bad,
> just that I personally don't work the way it works).
Hmmmm. I've been thinking about giving SuSE a try. The six CDs of packages
is attractive, and I hear good things about their quality. (Of course, I said
this about Debian, too...)
> Storm is a great distro built on Debian, that takes care of many problems.
I keep hearing that. Maybe I will give Storm a try soon.
> Of course, the RPM world continues to improve. So does the DEB world.
Certainly. I'm not expecting Debian to go away just because I don't like
it. It's just been awhile since we had a good flamewar on this list. ;-)
--
Ben Scott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Net Technologies, Inc. <http://www.ntisys.com>
Voice: (800)905-3049 x18 Fax: (978)499-7839
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