SUSE vs. Debian (lindows)

[Joel Hammer]

On Sun, Jan 18, 2004 at 08:23:37AM -0800, Net Llama! wrote:
> On 01/18/04 07:26, Joel Hammer wrote:
> 
> >I blew away my debian (lindows) box (make modules_install
> >is a dangerous command). It wouldn't boot anymore.
> 
> I don't follow you at all.  I don't see how installing modules is 
> dangerous, or how it can prevent you from booting the OS.  This sounds 
> like PEBCAK to me.

If modules required for the kernel to run properly are
missing, the kernel doesn't function, like reiserfs and
scsi modules.  If the new and old kernel have the same
version number, make modules_install overwrites the modules
that the old kernel requires with the newly compiled
modules, and it looks like the old modules are erased.
After the new kernel won't boot, as has been my unhappy
experience, the old kernel won't boot either because of
the missing modules. (Or, the old kernel with the SAME
version number reports that the version of the new modules
is wrong.) This happened in SUSE and lindows. It was very
unexpected in SUSE because the original kernel had some
suffix like -athlon, but the modules required for the
original kernel were overwritten by the newly compiled
modules. It wouldn't boot.


> >in /etc/init.d, was not automatically configured. You had
> >to do that yourself! So, I was not too impressed.
> 
> Ok, so that's SuSE.  What about the other distros out there?  BTW, which 
> daemons did you expect to have automatically configured in /etc/init.d ?

apt-get lprng
apt-get sendmail

both configured the daemons to run out of /etc/init.d.
I did have to supply a printcap file and run checkpc -f,
but that was it for lprng.


> >other drives.  It has the 2.4.23 kernel, including those
> 
> Oh, you mean the one with the huge exploit?  That sounds inexcusable to 
> me.  But seeing how lindows let's you run everything as root, i guess 
> security isn't a priority for them.
 
No, these lindows boxes run behind a firewall in my home,
so security isn't an issue.


> >couldn't do it with SUSE, either. I just don't get the
> >hang of initrd yet. My next project.
> 
> initrd is not required to build a kernel for _ANY_ hardware.  You could 
> always compile the support that you think you need in the initrd into 
> the kernel directly and get the same result.

That is my next project. However, SUSE used grub which
really needs initrd with reiserfs as far as I can
tell. Lindows used lilo and reiserfs. So, in theory I
could get by without initrd by building reiserfs into
the kernel, but unluckily lindows uses scsi drivers to
talk to my IDE drives (I have no idea why) and uses devfs
(Now THAT is a complete mystery.).  So, unless I want to
really modify lindow's approach, by not using those scsi
drivers and not using devfs, I am stuck with initrd.

Joel