what's the point of not=quite-current?<br><br>203:~ hexstar$ not=quite-current<br>203:~ hexstar$ echo $not<br>quite-current<br><br>huh??? waste of bandwidth..<_<<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 7/29/06, <b class="gmail_sendername">
Collins Richey</b> <<a href="mailto:crichey@gmail.com">crichey@gmail.com</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
I've drifted in and out of quite a few distros over the past 8 years.<br><br>Slackware - my first - not enough packages<br>Caldera - pretty good but SCO screwed the pooch<br>Man[drake|driva] - never really liked it.<br>SuSE - nevery really liked it, most especially the all-in-one
<br>configurator that screws with every configuration file in existence<br>RedHat - you can have any package you want as long as we have deemed<br>it's good for you (and our profit margin). Oh yeah, you can't really<br>tell what you're running, because we like to screw a round with
<br>patches. The initial reply toany supportquestion: uhh, we don't<br>support that.<br>CentOS - does a better job of marrying the RHEL base to other useful packages.<br>Novell - see SuSE, and oh yeah KDE is so passe (NOT)
<br>Debian testing - pretty darn good, lots of packages<br>Ubuntu - pretty darn good, lots of packages<br>Gentoo- my favorite for years<br><br>Most recently (past 1 1/2 years) I've run mostly the Kubuntu<br>development branch, but that came to an end recently for several
<br>reasons. I got a new machine that isn't well supported by the 6.06 LTS<br>version I'm running (more below). I tried to upgrade to Efty, but<br>their amateur attempts in the xorg modular arena screwed my system<br>thoroughly. If you have not=quite-current hardware and stick with what
<br>6.06 LTS provides, it's still a great system, as is Debian Etch.<br><br>Right now, after a diversion, I'm back where I was 2 years ago Gentoo<br>land. I don't have a complete set of packages built yet, but the<br>system performs the way I expect a system to perform.
<br><br>I've grown rather jaded with respect to the Enterprise systems, at<br>least for Desktop users. They provide a good solid product, but<br>they're all built around the concept of providing a base that is only<br>upgraded if something is badly broken (doesn't work for me does not
<br>constitute badly broken!) or a vulnerability crops up. That's great<br>for the corporate server environment and for the mythical corporate<br>desktop environment (there are damn few of these at present), but you<br>are SOL if you want something newer. Sometimes you're SOL even if you
<br>want what is broken to be fixed.<br><br>What I am always looking for is a middle ground between the bleeding<br>edge new development and the oldy-moldy enterprise distributions. I<br>don't appreciate screwing around with glibc and the compiler or X on a
<br>daily basis, butI like the ability to try out newer versions of<br>peripheral packages (Apache, MySQL, PostgrSQL, PHP, Ruby, etc.) on a<br>STABLE BASE and preferably alongside the tried-and-true versions.<br><br>In essence, that means Debian (possibly Ubuntu) or Gentoo. I'll still
<br>hang onto my CentOS and Ubuntu (maybe that will be usable again in a<br>month or so) setups, but most of my effort will go into completing my<br>Gentoo system.<br><br>There is another advantage in working with Debian or Gentoo. Ubuntu
<br>has done a fantastic job popularizing Debian, and their forums and<br>lists are populated by a lot of clueless newbies. No putdown intended;<br>clueless newbies are the hackers of the future if well treated in the<br>
present. The Gentoo forums (and I'm sure the same appliesto Debian,<br>but I have less experience there) and lists are visited mainly by<br>users with a more technical background, and thus frequently the<br>waiting time is less to get answers.
<br><br>And then there's the matter of kernels. Debian, Ubuntu, and the<br>Enterprise solutions all believe in the pre-packaged kernel with an<br>initrd and every module known to kerneldom. and pretty far removed<br>from the current stable kernel Gentoo also offers this "perverted"
<br>practice with the genkernel tool. My simple kernel with only those<br>functions I require will complete booting in about the same time it<br>takes one of these monstrosities to uncompress. Also, waiting for a<br>problem to be fixed in the pre-packaged versions is like watching
<br>paint dry, whereas I can easily compile a new kernel from <a href="http://kernel.org">kernel.org</a><br>to see if it fixes a problem. Granted there are procedures for<br>rebuilding the kernel package in Debian/Ubuntu, but you still get one
<br>of the all-in-one packages.<br><br>Fortunately, Gentoo is very much window manager neutral. Most of the<br>other suspects are in the category: Gnome is blessed by $DEITY, if you<br>want something different, knock yourself out.
<br><br>End of musings.<br><br>--<br>Collins Richey<br> If you fill your heart with regrets of yesterday and the worries<br> of tomorrow, you have no today to be thankful for.<br>_______________________________________________
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<br></blockquote></div><br>