<quote who="Alex Samad"> > Can people comment on the differences between the two. Both the lay out > of the file system and the its package manager.
File system: Recent versions of Red Hat and Debian are much the same, as they comply with the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard <http://www.pathname.com/fhs/>. SuSE is fairly different (/opt/gnome and such, which I find odd), and I'm not sure how quickly they're FHS'ing their distribution. Debian's policy requires that configuration files be in /etc, and suggests to maintainers that "you should consider creating a subdirectory of /etc named after your package". This means that different packages have an element of familiarity under Debian that they may not elsewhere. An example: Red Hat keeps Apache configuration in /etc/httpd/conf/ whilst Debian keeps it in /etc/apache/. I like that, especially when all my other software works the same way. Package management: It's all the same. Don't let anyone tell you differently. :-) And don't let anyone tell you that apt is better than rpm. They do completely different things! In Red Hat, you have rpm to manage your packages. Debian's equivalent is dpkg. They do very similar things in very similar ways, but the package format (and ideal behind the packages) is different. Being stuck with dpkg is as bad as being stuck with rpm - we have far more modern tools to use these days. In Debian, you have apt-get to install and update packages, whilst resolving their dependencies. In Red Hat, you have the Red Hat Network, apt-rpm, and a number of other tools that do this. apt-rpm (with a good upstream server) is very nice. [ There are also a number of other apt related utilities on Debian, such as apt-cdrom which lets you install packages from CD in a standard manner, apt-zip which lets you upgrade machines without network connections simply via cdrom, zip disks, etc. apt-listchanges that gives you a list of the changes in each package that you're upgrading, apt-move that lets you create a mirror from existing packages and rsyncs other mirrors, and so on. *Great* tools. ] RPMs are meant to install non-interactively, so they don't prompt you for information or tell you anything as you're installing them. They just get the binaries onto the disk, and let you get on with things. Debian has a very useful system called Debconf that asks you questions and pops up information about the packages in a standard manner as you're installing them. For example, when installing ssh on Debian, it reminds you about the ssh 1 -> 2 change, asks you if you want to run the ssh server and whether it should be suid root or not (whilst telling you what that entails). Postfix and exim give you an opportunity to configure them for common setups. Useful stuff. This is great for almost every time except installation. Red Hat just smacks the packages on the drive and goes away, Debian prompts you for lots of different settings and notices. [ There are ways of getting around that, though. ] Also, Debian packages tend to do a lot of work for you. For instance, Apache will set up dso modules nicely, and used to do a funky log rotation scheme that rotated every log that apache wrote to, but this has been replaced with logrotate for standardisation reasons. PHP modules ask to enable themselves in the configuration, etc. Debian packages tend to be maintained lovingly by people who use and enjoy the software (and who are often enough anal retentive system administrators who want it to work absolutely perfectly all the time), rather than employees who have to package many pieces of software each. It's an efficiency thing, and a love thing. :-) > Are there things that I can get for Debian that I can't for Redhat or vis > versa. Availability of software: Debian has a very large, distributed development community. This means that a *lot* of software is part of the official distribution. It also means that you have a huge amount of variety - there are lots of packages for specific niches, hardware or languages due to the diversity of the developers. I haven't used Freshmeat much since I installed Debian, because I can generally use local tools on my hard drive to sort and search through much of the available Free Software out there. That said, Debian isn't generally supported directly by independent software vendors such as Oracle, IBM, etc. That is changing, but you may find it harder in the short term. SuSE and Red Hat enjoy good support from many ISVs. > Please note I usually try to download source packages and compile and > install and use the rpm for convenience I only ever do that for software that I work on, or need specific fixes that aren't available in the current version distributed with my OS. I think you'll find yourself doing that less often on Debian, where the administrative burden of package managment and configuration is reduced. Hopefully a fairly balanced view. For the record, I choose Debian when I can. I recently returned to Red Hat administration (GNOME's servers are all Red Hat machines), and have found it somewhat painful and inefficient in comparison (read: I had to do stuff manually, and even think for myself on occasion). ;-) - Jeff -- "They cosset us with trappings to shut us up. That way when we say 'sharecropper!' you can point to my free suit and say 'Shut up pop star.'" - Courtney Love -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
