[CLUE-Tech] Fedora vs Debain

[Angelo Bertolli]

I'm afraid of Knoppix.  I have a bad gut feeling about it.  I do use it, 
but only for maintenence purposes, and even then, it has hung up on me 
once or twice.  Actually, this reminds me, Debian hung up on me quite a 
few times since I installed it.  Maybe it's a hardware conflict between 
my system and Debian style systems.

Anyway, after trying about 2 or 3 times, I'm pretty comfortable with 
installing the Debian base packages.  It sounds like if I used Knoppix 
for the install, I'd still have to do a lot of tweaking.  This is the 
main attraction to RH products:  the selection of packages.  I like the 
fact that I can click on "X-Windows" and it will install the packages 
that are good for X-Windows... but if they stopped there, I would say 
"that's not really what I want."  You can also lick on "details" which 
is just simply perfect.  The packages are categorized well, and in the 
details section they set aside the "non-optional" packages from the 
"optional" packages.  This is more helpful than you realize to get a 
system up quickly, yet also be able to tweak it and not install huge 
programs (emacs anyone?) which you don't need.

Maybe I can tolerate the RH branding and filesystem personality.  I did 
so far in the past.  One other thing that has annoyed me is that RH 
treated all their versions of Linux as completely different operating 
systems.  In other words, you never really could "upgrade RH 7 to RH 8" 
without screwing something up.  I wish they would have taken that 
approach.  That is one attractive thing about Debian... I feel like you 
can just upgrade it forever.

Angelo


>I'm sure I'm beating a dead horse, but here goes again.  Just get a
>Knoppix disk, do the install to disk (quick), then upgrade your apt-get
>controls, and then you can upgrade to whatever level of Debian you
>prefer. A one-time bit of grief, and then you'll have the Debian system
>you're lusting after.
>
>I did this very thing about a year ago, but I gave it up because I don't
>prefer the Debian setup. Pure laziness, of course, since it's no more
>difficult to get used to Debian than it is to Gentoo. But then, of
>course, there's the Debian Gnu-Linux religion which always leaves a sour
>taste in my mouth.
>
>Good luck.
>
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