[CLUE-Tech] RH flavor recommendation

[Jed S. Baer]

On Fri, 26 Nov 2004 22:54:35 -0800 (PST)
qqq1one @yahoo.com wrote:

> Anyone have a recommendations on which flavor of RH is best for home
> use these days?
...
> Fedora Core 1/2/3 (I can't tell if any of these are appropriate for
> home use in terms of security, stability, and continued availability of
> updates)

FC suffers from a lot of the problems the RH did. It installs a lot of
unneeded stuff, and its binaries are linked with everything including the
kitchen sink. Now some of this might not be the fault of RH/FC, because if
a core developer makes the software require linking with some component
which should be optional, that's a tougher fix than just configuring for a
compile without a feature.

A couple examples. FC3 installed NIS. I have no need for it. When I tried
to remove it, rpm complained of a dependency for authconfig-gtk, which is
required for the "firstboot" package. Well, removing the firstboot package
was a no-brainer. But why would an authentication config tool not be smart
enough to check for what's present, rather than requiring unneccessary
packages?

And, as is typical, FC3 installed NFS. I didn't look specifically for
which application group contained NFS as a "required" package, but surely
there are enough flavors of "server" that it's not tough to envision NFS
as optional. Easy enough to remove, but you still wonder why it was there
in the first place.

FC also contains surprises for old-hand RH users, as you might have
noticed from prior conversations here. Some of these are probably related
to adopting the 2.6 kernel, and I haven't yet dug into the gory details,
but one example is that apparently /etc/fstab is generated at boot time.
Now I don't know about you, but I'm pretty well set in my ways that fstab
is a "core" config file, i.e. it's where system changes or settings are
*really* made. So I was most annoyed to find that a couple things I
modified in it got reset at boot.

If you like certain older programs, you'll find yourself having to work to
get them into FC3 (and earlier renditons too?). Two examples: rxvt and xv.
xv (latest rpm I can find) will not work with the libjpeg that comes with
FC3 (no, I haven't yet tried compiling it). rxvt cannot open the
psuedo-tty device. I'm guessing the rxvt problem is related to the switch
from XFree86 to X.org. I don't know yet how much trouble it'll be to get
Fvwm going, because I haven't gotten back to being sure I have arch and
buildroot figured out for building it into an rpm from source. I'll
mention that I haven't yet explored using the Livna repository, so I don't
know how much it helps with these sorts of problems.

If you need serial over USB support, FC3 is broken, AFAICT.

If you use dialup networking, FC3 might be broken. But then
redhat-config-network has never worked for me for establishing a dialup
connection. Actually, Kppp works fine, now that think about it.

OTOH, there are very few things to dislike about KDE3.3. I'm not a fan of
Konqueror, but as an overall desktop/WM, KDE works nicely. I still prefer
Fvwm for configurability -- particularly of it's "panel" equivalent.

At this point, I mostly think about trying Debian or Slackware, rather
than continuing to mess with FC3.

jed
-- 
http://s88369986.onlinehome.us/freedomsight/

... it is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday
facilitate a police state. -- Bruce Schneier