* [Denis Solovyov] > As I said before, I'm very happy with situation when some key (really > basic) packages are updated by the provider, and some other critical > packages (usually Internet-related) can be easily added and maintained by > myself.
Nothing you can't do with any other distro, then? Nobody forces you to install Debian's or CentOS' packages. Just use the appropriate config method to filter out what you prefer maintaining yourself, and you're laughing. (In TSL I guess the easiest way to go would be to put your own repository of packages at level 0 in swup.conf and bump the official mirrors to level 1. In an apt-using distribution, I guess you could use pinning, and in an apt-and-deb using distribution you'd use pinning or dpkg --set-selections). > What is (in your opinion) the most similar to TSL Linux distro? Being small > (1 CD for all is cool) and stable, well-maintained, having history for at > least several years. If you want the distribution most similar to TSL, I suggest TSL. Nothing's more similar than itself :) As for your requirements: small: Well, I already mentioned slimming Debian 3.0 down to 48MB and how 1 hour of my paid time is equivalent to a few gigs of disk. That being said, I don't think I ever downloaded more than CD 1 of any Debian version. The installer will transparently download any additional packages you want from a Debian mirror. Like Viper, the Debian installer also grabs all current security updates at install time, which seems to me like a nice and time-saving thing to do. Also, because of smart distribution of packages between CDs, you'll find most or all you need to deploy a small Debian system on the first CD. Ubuntu is much the same, except that it has only one install CD for each flavour and expects everyone to download any additional packages. As for deployments on several similar machines, most distributions have some kind of kickstart-like system, and if that's too much work, the Gentoo tarball approach works just as well for any distribution. I myself prefer using Norton/Symantec Ghost when doing many similar installations, but with it being a commercial closed source program, I realize that it is not an option for everyone. stable: We have a lot of boxes in some very-restricted-access networks running Red Hat Linux 7.2 with fairly high CPU loads most of the day. The service personnel are starting to complain because of uptime rollovers -- their monitoring system reports a reboot when uptime passes 497 days and some hours and the uptime counter rolls over to 0. Just goes to show that anything can be stable if you don't touch it too much. (at school we had a box that reached rollover -- it was running RHL 4.2 with kernel 2.0.34). Proper stability comes from being able to maintain the system without having it fall over. In that respect, it seems to me that most large distributions do more QA than what TSL can document. I can't remember having noticed any "brown paperbag" fixes in Debian stable, Ubuntu, RHEL or SuSE (though I haven't really been following the two last ones much). well-maintained: Together with TSL, I can remember Red Hat, Debian, Ubuntu, SuSE, OpenWall, Slackware, and Gentoo being members of a closed list for discussing security issues and doing coordinated releases (there are probably more than those members, too). This is how everyone can do security updates at more or less the same time for the same bug with the same CVE-number. As for bugfixes in stable, I actually think TSL do more than most others. This might mean that the TSL developers are less afraid of touching stable (a double-edged sword), or that TSL has more bugs to fix in stable. history of at least several years: Well, this is where Ubuntu falls short -- with their first release being Ubuntu 4.10 (in October 2004), I must say that almost-two-years are significantly less than several. (one might argue that good behaviour during that short history might help, but that was not in the requirement specification. Adding a few years for being basically a Debian spinoff with Debian developers making it seems to be cheating, so I won't). As for TSL, you may count history back to November 1999 when Erlend was hired, February/March 2000 when we released 1.0, late 2003 when Comodo picked it up, or even ~May 2004 when the longest running currently active developer (Ajith Vargese Thampi) was hired. You could say that companies and developers come and go, but TSL seems to outlast them all. Current distributions that have longer history than TSL include Slackware, Red Hat Linux (if you count RHL and RHEL as the same), SuSE, Debian, and Mandriva (if you count Mandrake and/or Connectiva). I think Slackware is the oldest currently active Linux distribution. ..though if we don't limit ourselves to Linux, but say something like "freenix" instead, I figure the BSD family has them all beat.. > What distro can awake interest in inveterate TSL user (and make him happy as > well)? Is there such? It's difficult to give a general answer here, so I guess I'll have to resort to namedropping.. ;) I don't know about so many users in such detail, but Daniel Meyer who posted in this thread started using TSL at 1.1 or 1.2 and was a developer from ~1.5 until the "Enterprise incident" with 2.1. He already stated his new preference a few times, which I think was "Gentoo, but (k)ubuntu's not too shabby in certain cases, either". Gerald Dachs, a TSL user and developer for about the same time as Mr. Meyer, seems to be active in the Tinysofa Classic community. Christian Haugan Toldnes, user since ~August 2000 and developer August 2001 seems to have this strange liking for Ubuntu. Erlend B. Midttun, chief TSL developer since the project's birth in late 1999 until leaving in late 2005 seems to prefer Ubuntu these days. Øystein Viggen, hired in february 2000 to do docs for 1.0 and involved in TSL development a few months later runs Ubuntu on his desktops and is currently deploying some servers for customers running Debian 3.1. In fact, I'm not sure I personally know anyone not on Comodo's payroll who would currently deploy TSL on new installations, and that's coming from an inveterate developer living in the city that was TSL's home for 6 years. Anyway, a good sysadmin will probably know how to work with more than 1 Linux distribution, and if he doesn't he'll easily learn. Anyone doing good work with Debian could probably do good with TSL and vice versa. No Linux distributions are difficult, some are just more convenient. I guess I should shut up now, though.. Speaking out against a former employer never looked very professional. Øystein -- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. ..of course, the virus would tell you the same thing.. _______________________________________________ tsl-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.trustix.org/mailman/listinfo/tsl-discuss
