Hi all On Sun, 5 Jan 2003, John Summerfield wrote:
> On Thu, 2 Jan 2003, Marco Shaw wrote: > > > > Sure wish IBM would support Debian. It is SO VERY much nicer to use. > > > > Is that a general statement about Debian, or you find Debian/390 to be > > very good compared to other Linux/390 distributions? > > My experience is all IA32. > > I've been using Red Hat Linux since 3.0.3. Recent releases are easy to > install and adapt easily to changed configurations such as a change of > NIC, mouse, new drives and such. Also, much configuration is assisted by > GUIs. Recent RedHat, Mandrake and SuSE are indeed easy to install. > > With the advent of RH 8.0, RH and I have some differences and I've been > looking at Debian. > > Debian's installer "needs work," I've not discovered much in the way of > tools to help users configure stuff. > > One RHL one installs stuff and then configures it, but it's up to you to > figure what needs to be configured. Mostly, stuff is in a working state. > > on Debian, much configuration is interactive; you leave off installing a > bunch of software to configure less, and that's a pain, it makes > automatic installations akin to Red Hat's kickstart process difficult. Actually, the first question debconf asks you is "how interactive should I be?" Default is "meduim", mazochists (like those that chose "select packages manually" on RH) select "low". But you may select to be asked nothing. The debian policy says that a package should have sane defaults even if it got no input from the user. > > To be sure, cloning is easy enough. > > However, one you have the system setup and running, I think Debian wins. > *I* want to get my updates from a local mirror, and Red Hat's tools for > package-maintenance don't so easily support that. For that reason I've > not used Red Hat's up2date facility. You can set-up a local up2date server, BTW. It will not be officially supported by redhat. But there are a number of free implementations. You can also set-up apt-get for rpm. It is said to be working well. Mandrake has urpmi working out-of-the-box, which has all the basic features of apt-get. > > On Debian, apt-get automatically gets the latest versions of packages. > Installing Apache? It gets the updated version for your release plus all > the requirements. > > I've not tried updating from one release to another, but as I understand > it, it's supposed to work on the running system, without rebooting > (except to activate your new kernel). Updating from potato to woody generaly wrked nicely for me (on live systems,I mean). I once even downgraded a system that was a bit into testing back to stable using apt alone. Anyway, the upgrade will not upgrade the kernel automatically, as kernel packages are "kernel-image-<kernelversion>". You'll have to upgrade it manually. -- Tzafrir Cohen mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.technion.ac.il/~tzafrir
