Ubuntu CD's for Free

[A. Khattri]

On Wed, 8 Dec 2004, David Bandel wrote:

> Maybe yes, maybe no, but you need to be pre-0.99 to beat me (can't
> even remember what year that was, perhaps '92 or '93, but I was
> admin'ing SunOS4 and Ultrix at the time I found out about Linux and
> started playing with it).

I believe it was '91 when I started and I was also using SUNOS, UTX32
(Gould mini) and 4.2BSD-derived systems at that time. (My college still
had CPM machines in use ;-)

> Gentoo on the other hand is a little too cutting edge (and I don't
> want blood all over my clients' systems).

So I suppose FreeBSD is "cutting edge" because its uses source packages
too?

Gentoo is only cutting edge if you choose to install masked packages (this
is equivalent to installing from the unstable tree in Debian). Even though
you can decide this on a per-package basis in Gentoo its probably not a
good idea on production servers so I dont do it. Gentoo supports slotting
so you can install different versions of a package simultaneously if you
want for testing and rollback to a prior version if need be. So far Ive
not had any problems after a year of use on my servers.

Again, the most important thing for me is ease and speed of maintenance.
Updates consist of rsyncing the Portage tree (similar to cvsup in
FreeBSD). This also makes it easy to setup local repositories and have
just one server sync with the Gentoo mirrors and then other servers sync
locally. Waiting for RH updates after a security problem sometimes meant
waiting weeks for binaries. Same for Debian. Source-level updates are much
faster than having to backport patches, generate binaries and spend weeks
testing.

> Besides, I'd be permanently
> connected to all my clients waiting for everything to compile.

On modern servers this is very fast. Even better, I build binaries
automatically during the wee hours when loads are at their lowest so
installation becomes a simple binary install the following day.

> Actually, you sound like a Slackware candidate (and if you've used
> Linux as long as you say, you must have used Slack as it and SLS were
> the only distros before RH came out).

My early use of Linux in college, was on a 486DX with 8Mb RAM. I installed
SLS (30 floppies - took ages to rawrite each one!) into a 80Mb partition
(10Mb for swap). That included X and the GNU toolchain. I used this setup
for my final year project. I also use NetBSD on a tiny NEC MobilePro
780 running off a 256Mb flash card ;-)

> Are these folks still around? I thought they died about the time 2400
> baud modems were introduced to the unwashed masses.

Yep, still around but I think they're owned by AOL now (or maybe MSN, I
lost track).



-- 
DEC Wars n.

 A 1983 Usenet posting by Alan Hastings
   and Steve Tarr spoofing the "Star Wars" movies in hackish
   terms.  Some years later, ESR (disappointed by Hastings and Tarr's
   failure to exploit a great premise more thoroughly) posted a
   3-times-longer complete rewrite called
   Unix WARS;
   the two are often confused.