Quoting Shlomi Fish, from the post of Sat, 04 Jan: > 1. The latest version of RedHat, while possibly running a 2.2.x kernel. > 2. Mandrake 9.0 (which ships with a 2.2.x kernel).
what's with the 2.2 kernel fixation? > S.u.s.e is not completely free, as some parts of the core distribution are > proprietary. Whether it should make any difference depends on how much one > is idealogical in regard to free software. I also find it unconventional > in comparison to RH/MDK, but that may have changed after it got the LSB > certificate. SuSE is a real PITA for me, since it very much forces you to use the annoying YAST for everything and steps over manual changes you make to conf files. I eat S&%T from it at work each day praying to the day we'll switch to RHL. for many reasons I'm dead against it, YAST and other parts not being free is a central issue, and the fact mirroring it and its security updates is an overkill (for lack of local interest), I say stay away... > Gentoo is a source distribution with a very flexible packaging system. > I don't know how many people of the core iglu.org.il had any experience > working with it. Furthermore, we will need to compile everything from > source, and since it's a single-processor machine, we can render the > system unusable or temporarily exploitable for quite some time. very cute as an experimental home machine, but as 90% of the inhabitants of #gentoo will tell you, it is NOT for production systems. still too young and too fresh. package system is virtually non existant - in Gentoo they only check dependency of compilation, but new versions are installed over old without cleaning first... it's a real mess, and not guarantees any security timely updates. the concept of "closing a version" is non-existant, it's in flux as much as Debian's unstable. in short - NOT for a server, NOT for this server at all. > Debian is a distribution with a very sophisticated package management > system (short only of Gentoo) and a huge trio of packages pool. It is Gentoo has very little in terms of a package system (read above) and definitly not better than Debian, I have no idea where you got that. > still not LSB-compliant as RedHat and Mandrake are. Moreover, a new who cares about LSB? either way, it's in the works. > version of the distribution comes out every three years or so, while woody was 2 years in the making, not 3, and it was the longest it EVER took to get a version out. lots of people complained and things are taking on a different shape for Sarge (the next release). they want to have it out in a few months. the fact Debian doesn't rush into a new release every so many months is a source of stability, not stagnation (see testing and unstable if you want). there is a relyability and robustness in the fact they only release when they have a technicly sound offering and not when the marketing department demands it. > other distributions have semi-annual upgrades. Nonetheless, a Debian > system can be made up to date by upgrading to the testing distribution > using apt. which can't be trusted for security updates. however, I'm glad to say it's so rediculesly easy to mix packages from two distributions, and have non-root stuff or non-server stuff run from a potentially less security-kept source that is more recent makes it all a joy to maintain and balance usability and security. I'm managing 4 servers today on Debian. one on unstable and three on stable, and frankly there is no other distribution I'd prefer. other than the easy and semi-automatic updates (I get notifications in Email and install them as soon as I get to an ssh-capable machine), it's the easiest distro for me to bring to a virtually zero-maintenence state. I encoraged the Fiasco group to switch to Debian too at some point in the past (and for a time I helped maintain it), and they'll tell you how Debian is indeed perfect for remote management of a secure server. it's my #1 choice. other reasons: excellent apache and apache-ssl packages, lots of little goodies like well-packaged qmail, webanalog and other packages we now install manually and many more. > I think there's a lot of hype in Debian about how free it is, and it > hurts the other free distributions, and even the proprietary Linux > distributors whose core system components are still open-source. It I don't care about who is more free or less free as long as their objectives are true, and that's giving the users the good product. RHL in the last few years started behaving like SuSE by hiding documentation to supposedly open source (Anaconda and friends), giving bad solutions to simple problems (up2date), and generally releasing badly tested *.0 releases, to the point client software breaks or even data loss. I don't feel any obligation to use their product only because they are our best representation in the business arena these days. I just stopped trusting them at some point, and frankly, since I moved to apt, I'm happy I don't have to touch the low levels of rpm and dpkg unless something breaks REAL bad (which modern distros experiance rarley if at all) > does not help too much that Debian is the FSF endorsed distribution, > and that it has a distinction among "free" and "non-free" packages. If > you ask me, it's just free software bigotism. I chose Debian on technical merit and not just ideological ones. also the structure and community of the project attract me, and fits my political and social views on the world. last but not least is the social leading ideology behind GNU and Debian that is also importnat, but that's an added bonus, not the main reason for my voting Debian. This cannon has spoken :) -- Even better than the real thing Ira Abramov http://ira.abramov.org/email/ This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
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