A pox on Fedora and in their hat too

[Kevin O'Gorman]

On Fri, 17 Dec 2004 07:15:55 -0700, Collins Richey <crichey at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 17 Dec 2004 08:26:03 -0500 (EST), A. Khattri <ajai at bway.net> wrote:
> > On Thu, 16 Dec 2004, Kevin O'Gorman wrote:
> >
> > > Huh?  GRP?  I gotta read the FM some day.  Wozzat?  If it's
> > > something I gotta do, it won't happen -- too much difference
> > > between machines.
> > >
> > > Why would it be any better than any else's binary distro?
> >
> >
> > A GRP install is the nearest Gentoo gets to a binary install.
> >
> 
> GRP is just that - a quick and binary install. You get a quick way to
> install the product with the most comonly needed packages available as
> binaries at the current stable level as of when the GRP binaries were
> built (check the doco for which [limited set of] cpu types are
> available). After the install, all upgrdes are compile from source.

That's the killer then.  I'm not going to have this machine spending its
time compiling.  It's too slow on the one hand and too mission-critical
on the other.

I respect David Bandel's recommendations, and he liked Gentoo, Debian
deriviatives and Slackware.  I'm guessing the learning curve for Slackware
is pretty steep from what I've heard.  Gentoo is out.  I already installed
Ubuntu, and it appears to be a little shaky around the edges, but a
usable Debian derivative, so I think I'll stick with it.

The shaky part, in case you wonder: it wants the root account disabled,
with a single user account able to use sudo.  Unfortunately this does not
play well with some of the GUI admin tools.  I couldn't activate the
network config gizmo without first giving root a password.  I can always
take it away, but I anticipate ongoing annoyance until they get this ironed
out.

My one concern is that I'm unsure of the maturity level of the packages
in general.  I gather that David likes "trusted", and it makes sense to me.
I don't know how that compares to what Ubuntu is distributing, or if it matters.
I'm not too deep into Ubuntu at this point that I couldn't change, and I have
a number of days of the holiday break left, in which I could effect a change.
Are there other variants that are noticeably better than Ubuntu?

++ kevin 


-- 
Kevin O'Gorman, PhD