[wellylug] Not everyone pleased with new Mandrake renaming/release schedule

[Brent Wood]

--- Cliff Pratt <enkidu at cliffp.com> wrote:
> Brent Wood wrote:
> > 
> > My brief dabblwe with Debian left me unimpresssed.
>  >
> Care to say why? I moved from DeadRat to Debian some time 
> ago, and I'm not likely to change back to an RPM based disto 
> any time before hell freezes over.

Ummm, I have had much greater success with both YaST & urpmi/drakepkg to
install packages than with synaptic or apt-get. A couple of years ago this
might have been different, but that's my experience right now. I think RPM is
working much better than it used to. I can download an RPM, double click &
install it, with all dependencies generally being picked up fine. So why would
I move?

The "commercial" CD's with Mandrake & SuSE come ready to run & auto install
things like Rekall, the Nvidia 3D graphics drivers, etc. So I install &
(generally) everything works. When it doesn't I add a repository or two & it
goes. So dependency hell has been worse for me with Debian than Mandrake/SuSE.

I know another Linux GIS guy who just tried Ubuntu, had all sorts of dependency
& compilation woes & went back to Mandrake 10.1 (yesterday) where everything
just works.

Your mileage may differ :-)

I'm currently using Ubuntu on an A64 box coz it works better on my platform
than Mandrake or SuSE. (IMHO the bugs are not out of A64 Linux yet). It may be
just the A64/Ubuntu rather than straight Debian, but the simplest way for me to
install packages & have then work reliably is tarballed source, then make/make
install.  

I suggest you don't treat RPM based distros as Red Hat equivalents. RH might
have put the R in RPM, but others have improved substantially on the original.

If you discuss distros with OS GIS developers (summat that crops up
frequently), they seem to be mostly SuSE, Mandrake, Debian & Fedora. A few
Ubuntu & Gentoo. I don't know any using Red Hat.

So that agrees strongly with your shift from Red Hat, but suggests Debian is
not the only way forward.

Be grateful for the choices, Debian suits some, just not everyone :-)

...but the general feeling about Red Hat seems more universal.



Spotcha...

  Brent