[CLUE-Tech] Escape from RH 8.0

[Jed S. Baer]

On Sun, 2 Mar 2003 10:57:51 -0700
Collins <erichey2 at attbi.com> wrote:

> On Sunday 02 March 2003 10:20 am, David Anselmi wrote:
> > Jed S. Baer wrote:
> 
> [ snips ]
> 
> > [...]
> >
> > To go with DLL Hell that MS developers suffer, I call this "GUI Hell".
> > That's when the dialog says "Click cancel to prevent <some undesirable
> > action>." and all you have is a "Yes" button.
> >
> > >>>Well, since I'm ranting away, anyone know how to disable the
> > >>>"/dev/hdd=ide-scsi" in Grub? I removed that from the Grub config
> > >>>window when installing, but it still loads up the scsi modules at
> > >>>boot, but there aren't any lines in my grub.conf which would seem
> > >to>>be calling for that. Yeah, I know, I gotta RTFM, but at the
> > >moment,>>I'm overwhelmed with how badly this whole thing sucks.
> >
> 
> A little bit <OT>, since I can't help you with the RH RPM-Hell or
> GUI-hell, but at this point in such a query I usually ask myself, why
> would anyone want to run anything but gentoo?

Being only passingly aware of Gentoo, I can't completely speak to that,
but IIRC, it relies heavily on having bandwidth.

...

> Unless there is a major incompatible change in the glibc/gcc/kernel 
> environment, you never need to reinstall to be at current level.  The
> concept of needing to install a different RH release to get KDE 3.1
> (etc.) is foreign to gentoo.

Actually, the same can be said for any RPM-based distro. I could, if I
wanted to (and have, in the past), just continue to apply updates as I
feel like it. I've done glibc and the kernel this way, as well as several
interations of Gnome.

However, for folks such as I, who have only a lowly modem connection, and
a bad one at that, the process can get tedious. Yes, at times I've used
other peoples machines to dl stuff, but over time, I wind up with enough
stuff I want to upgrade that getting the latest distro is easiest. In this
case, I picked up the RH CDs when the bus tour came through town. I once
tried to download the Mozilla RPMs -- that took a long time.

> As a side note, I installed and ran RH 7.3 for a couple of months just
> to familiarize myself with the RH offering, and I was quite pleased with
> the stability of the system.  Very soon, though, I descended into
> RPM-hell, since I couldn't find any RPMs tailored for RH for most of the
> add-on packages that I wanted, so I returned to the mother ship.

And, nothing stops me from building from source on my RH box. I build Pan,
Sylpheed, Apache, and PHP from source. I was building Gnome from source a
while back. I could do the same for anything else I want. It's a bit of a
pain when upgrading though, coz I have to rebuild sometimes. This time
around, for example, I had to rebuild Sylpheed, but Apache is running
without a rebuild. It's a little more of a management issue than staying
with strict RPMs, though.

RPM hell seems to be less an issue now than before, although I now need to
fix my Perl installation after upgrading RH, which annoys me. I note that
one cant' always blame RH for that, sometimes packagers just make dumb
decisions.

But do think this might be my last RH upgrade, unless they come out with a
setup mechanism that lets me choose whether I want the dumbed-down (hey,
it's almost like Windoze!) or the "I know what I'm doing" configuration.

I will say I much prefer KDE as it comes on the Knoppix distro, to RH's
bluecurved rendition.

The biggest barrier to switching to something like Debian or SuSe though,
is simple familiarity, and the fact that I have a running system built
around the decisions I made when I intially built it (using Gentus --- a
tweaked RH). I don't look forward to spending the time to make the switch.
My expectation is that trying to install another distro over the top of RH
will leave me with a mess of stuff in differing locations, which I will
never get cleaned up. I think I'd be better of waiting until I can build a
new machine.

jed
-- 
I wouldn't even think about bribing a rottweiler with a steak that
didn't weigh more than I do. -- Jason Earl