What's after OpenLinux?

[Collins Richey]

On Sat, 8 Mar 2003 10:09:12 -0800
Bill Campbell <bill at celestial.com> wrote:

> On Sat, Mar 08, 2003 at 10:02:50AM -0500, dep wrote:
> >begin  Collins Richey's  quote:
> >
> >| They've finally caught up with gentoo <grin>
> >
> >they're a pain in the ass, but they're not *that* bad.
> 
> I haven't tried gentoo, LFS, or any of the other do-it-yourself forms of
> Linux, primarily because I would rather spend my time building things on
> top of a working distribution.  It's enough of a problem keeping up with
> new releases of software, and still have time for development and support
> of our own stuff.
> 

And there is no pressing reason for you to consider the DIY distros, since you have a commercial enterprise and since the package costs of any of any commercial distro is moderate in comparison to M$$$$$.  Interestingly enough, even Dan Robbins (gentoo) does not recommend his distro for a server environment (although quite a few folks are running rock solid gentoo servers.)

In my case (desktop user and tinkerer and occaisonal curmudgeon) I don't spend much time getting a working distro (gentoo) because it's done once (well twice in 3 years), and then I can spend my time "building things on top of a working distribution."  When I do get the urge to tinker, I usually try something new (for me) in a spare partition, but I always wind up back at gentoo.

With the possible exception of SuSE, none of the commercial vendors seem to be interested in making available a very large, current software inventory.  Rather than waiting for RH, SuSE, Mandrake, et al to cobble up a new distro to sell me, I rely on the small army of DIY developers at gentoo to keep me supplied with more software than I can possibly find time to experiment with.  Obviously, my approach is not going to help commercial vendors sell their wares!
> We don't make any money selling Linux itself so we now buy SuSE from our
> local CompUSA store rather than go through distribution, and make sure that
> our business sales rep.  at CompUSA is aware of this in hopes that this
> encourages them to continue to keep it in stock as an alternative to Red
> Hat.  
> 

That's a good approach.  For the same reason, I like to buy from local computer sellers rather than mail order unless there is a really significant price differential.  I did order my scanner from Dell, however, because only the local big box stors carried it, and they wanted an arm and a leg.

> One of the primary reasons I like
> Linux and FreeBSD is that this type of thing is a lot easier to do than to
> convince a proprietary vendor to make their source code available to
> outsiders to fix.  Open Source works because there are thousands of
> knowledgeable people working on problems that they need to have work,
> feeding their results back into the system.
> 

Ayup!  Seldom do I encounter a problem (gentoo specific or package specific) that the gentoo-user list cannot answer hundreds of times faster than a commercial help desk.  The same can be said of other smaller distro specific user groups.

--
Collins