On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 10:41 PM, Dante Lanznaster <[email protected]> wrote: > See? This is the kind of stuff everyone is talking about. Manny, you went > out of your way just to try it out, and it worked, it's a good solution, but > then again, there's gonna be 1000 different little tiny bit factors wrong > with it, so it doesn't apply. Some people just don't wanna be helped.
Let me give all of you a differing perspective, one not unlike Jeff's. I too was a long time Mandriva user back from when I used to work there, and even before that. The move from Mandriva to Ubunto (or more specifically from an rpm based system to a deb based system) is not intuitive. 1. All the package tools change. In Mandriva you have rpm and urpm* tools (urpmq, urpmi, urpme, etc), in CentOS, you have rpm and yum. In Debian you have dselect, dpkg and apt-get, apt-cache, aptitude, synaptic. Commandline switches change, methods of package dependency computation change, etc. 2. Locations change. No more /etc/sysconfig, some things are now in /etc/defaults, networking moves to /etc/network, hostname set in /etc/hostname, I still haven't found the file that sets the IP address and netmask, I still haven't found the file where I can set static routes. 3. I hate Gnome. I much prefer KDE. But I use Gnome because it's there and it works well enough. I'd consider going back to fvwm2 or fluxbox, but having a desktop is nice, so I just duke it out with Gnome. 4. The things that make Ubuntu nice are REALLY nice. Built-in wireless B/G works out of the box with my Lenovo. It's very laptop friendly with the power monitoring and whatnot (one of the few things I like about Gnome is that power app). 5. Package updates are well done and have never caused me breakage. However, and there is always a comma after however, a dist upgrade from 8.10 to 9.04 broke everything and required a full reinstall. That's something that has never happened to me on any other distro, not even Gentoo. I could not massage it to boot using any method. It basically looked like glibc got changed and almost nothing else, so the new kernel couldn't boot, the older kernels got all the way to trying to mount the root partition, but that failed. 6. Is there a way to boot the live CD into a rescue mode? Something that will scan the partitions, detect various OS's, and mount them in proper heirarchy allowing you to chroot into them and fix things? Maybe I overlooked the obvious, and I only looked for about 2 minutes, but I couldn't find a way to do it, so I moved on and just did a full reinstall. That's something that RedHat and Mandriva have been doing since at least 2000, but I didn't find it in Ubuntu. 7. It makes my eyes hurt to see a perl CPAN package Mail::Sendmail be named libmail-sendmail-perl in Ubunuto, as opposed to the RedHat convention of perl-mail-sendmail. But the fact that I know that means that it's no longer slowing me down (and if it did, I have the old fallback of perl -MCPAN). 8. I still can't grok the steps to building a package in Ubuntu. My experience with it thus far is that unless I can copy and paste the commands to do it, none of it makes sense to me. I KNOW it can be done: many, many people do it every day, but the intricacies of the deb build process are still eluding me. That's opposite my experience with Mandriva at home and Centos at work, where I maintain an internal repo for multiple distros and arches with 50 or so rpms that I have custom built from scratch or adapted existing src rpms to my needs. I don't think that there is anything inherently wrong with the way that Ubuntu works. What Jeff is saying, and I guess I am too, is that it is so different, and being that much different has a negative impact on our productivity because it doesn't match our established patterns of work. I have everything working well enough to get my work done, so I can't complain about it impacting my productivity right now. However, every time I have to CHANGE something, it takes research and time to do something I already know how to do in CentOS, time which would be better spent getting work done. -- Regards... Todd
