SUSE vs. Debian (lindows)

[Joel Hammer]

Just to share an experience of comparing SUSE (rpm) and
lindows (debian).

I blew away my debian (lindows) box (make modules_install
is a dangerous command). It wouldn't boot anymore.

So, I installed SUSE pro 9.0 on another drive to try
to recover the lindows installation. (After failing to
do this with knoppix.) I also wanted to see what I was
missing with lindows.  It installed easily, but was
very slow. It set the time wrong. It didn't detect my
old lindows installation and configure grub for it, it
didn't automatically configure fstab and mount my other
drives. Installing additional software was torture. I got
tired of changing cd's constantly, and yast worked but
what a nuisance. With apt-get or the warehouse, you can
install numerous packages with just a few commands, then
go do something else while they install themselves. And to
my amazement, newly installed software, like the daemons
in /etc/init.d, was not automatically configured. You had
to do that yourself! So, I was not too impressed.

I then downloaded the new version of lindows from their
warehouse (using my other lindows box) and burned it to cd.

Lindows installed in about 10 minutes or less, detected
and configured lilo.conf to boot both my old and new
installation, and automatically detected and mounted my
other drives.  It has the 2.4.23 kernel, including those
wireless modules I had blown my old system away trying
to compile and install.  It detected my wireless card,
although I still haven't gotten around to configuring
it. (Gotta find those wireless extensions!) It set the
time properly.

Installing software was easy, just apt-get or the lindows
warehouse. A big nice surprise was the software I had
paid for (Staroffice, moneydance).  These installed from
the warehouse without (apparently) additional charges to
me.

In summary, it was very easy. The only problem I had
with the lindows warehouse was installing sendmail. The
Click and Run software doesn't seem to run post install
scripts which require user input, so, sendmail wouldn't
install via the lindows warehouse. apt-get did fine with
sendmail, though.

So, I said goodbye to rpm based systems, hopefully
forever. I also learned that my inability to burn and
boot a new kernel was not due to lindows or debian. I
couldn't do it with SUSE, either. I just don't get the
hang of initrd yet. My next project.

Joel