On Sat, 8 Mar 2003 10:09:12 -0800 Bill Campbell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 08, 2003 at 10:02:50AM -0500, dep wrote: > >begin Collins Richey's quote: > > > >| They've finally caught up with gentoo <grin> > > > >they're a pain in the ass, but they're not *that* bad. > > I haven't tried gentoo, LFS, or any of the other do-it-yourself forms of > Linux, primarily because I would rather spend my time building things on > top of a working distribution. It's enough of a problem keeping up with > new releases of software, and still have time for development and support > of our own stuff. > And there is no pressing reason for you to consider the DIY distros, since you have a commercial enterprise and since the package costs of any of any commercial distro is moderate in comparison to M$$$$$. Interestingly enough, even Dan Robbins (gentoo) does not recommend his distro for a server environment (although quite a few folks are running rock solid gentoo servers.) In my case (desktop user and tinkerer and occaisonal curmudgeon) I don't spend much time getting a working distro (gentoo) because it's done once (well twice in 3 years), and then I can spend my time "building things on top of a working distribution." When I do get the urge to tinker, I usually try something new (for me) in a spare partition, but I always wind up back at gentoo. With the possible exception of SuSE, none of the commercial vendors seem to be interested in making available a very large, current software inventory. Rather than waiting for RH, SuSE, Mandrake, et al to cobble up a new distro to sell me, I rely on the small army of DIY developers at gentoo to keep me supplied with more software than I can possibly find time to experiment with. Obviously, my approach is not going to help commercial vendors sell their wares! > We don't make any money selling Linux itself so we now buy SuSE from our > local CompUSA store rather than go through distribution, and make sure that > our business sales rep. at CompUSA is aware of this in hopes that this > encourages them to continue to keep it in stock as an alternative to Red > Hat. > That's a good approach. For the same reason, I like to buy from local computer sellers rather than mail order unless there is a really significant price differential. I did order my scanner from Dell, however, because only the local big box stors carried it, and they wanted an arm and a leg. > One of the primary reasons I like > Linux and FreeBSD is that this type of thing is a lot easier to do than to > convince a proprietary vendor to make their source code available to > outsiders to fix. Open Source works because there are thousands of > knowledgeable people working on problems that they need to have work, > feeding their results back into the system. > Ayup! Seldom do I encounter a problem (gentoo specific or package specific) that the gentoo-user list cannot answer hundreds of times faster than a commercial help desk. The same can be said of other smaller distro specific user groups. -- Collins _______________________________________________ Linux-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe/Suspend/Etc -> http://www.linux-sxs.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-users
