Okay, I can accept that - particularly the install ease. Although pesonally I'd prefer improving Debian's install over going the all-new route, but that's just me. It just seemed to me that Debian's two big advantages (the guaranteed "all-free"ness and the robustness of apt-get) were what you were asking for in your original post.
Best, Andy ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Andrew J Perrin - http://www.unc.edu/~aperrin Assistant Professor of Sociology, U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill [EMAIL PROTECTED] * andrew_perrin (at) unc.edu On Tue, 4 Nov 2003, Magnus wrote: > > On Tuesday, November 4, 2003, at 10:34 AM, Andrew Perrin wrote: > > > Not that I want to start a distro war, but what's wrong with Debian? > > I need to tread carefully here because some people can be very > sensitive about their favorite distributions. > > Debian does not yet have a facility as robust as kickstart for > deploying large numbers of similarly configured machines. > > Many people prefer the RPM package management system to Debian's > system. Some of the tools that are available for RPM (like yum) are > every bit as good as the much heralded apt-get. > > Having a distro flavored more like Red Hat will make it easier to get > proprietary applications (like Oracle) to run. Though of course they > likely wouldn't be officially supported (at least not until the distro > built up enough critical mass to leverage their consumer buying power) > > Many of us have been using Red Hat Linux or Mandrake and have built a > set of tools that is geared towards automating the deployment and > maintenance of large numbers of such systems. Adapting this model to > work with Debian would require a complete retooling. Forking Red Hat > and/or Mandrake would make it that much easier to continue to use our > site-specific tool kits. > > And, finally, Debian is just very rough around the edges. The > installer is quite difficult and non-linear. Simple command line tools > to make complex changes to the system don't seem to be there (who wants > to muck with PAM settings to authenticate against LDAP & Kerberos when > you can just run authconfig and check off a couple of menu options?). > Debian is a very important distro but there is a large cross section of > the Linux community that it does not appeal to for these reasons and > more. > -- TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/ TriLUG PGP Keyring : http://trilug.org/~chrish/trilug.asc
