[TriLUG] Debian & Mandrake (was installfest server - ...)

[Tanner Lovelace]

On Wed, 2002-05-01 at 15:08, Mark Johnson wrote:

> You got me, I had no idea Mandrake was setup this way. Cool. 

Well, it took me quite a while to figure out it was being modeled
after Debian.  I just thought they had some pretty cool ways
of doing things.:-)
 
[...]

 
> BTW, does Mandrake have something like Debian's apt/sources.list? 

Well, you don't edit a particular file, but you add sources
with the urpmi.addmedia command.  Remove them with the urpmi.removemedia
command.  The urpmi.update command is equivalent to apt-get update.
urpme removes packages (including dependencies).  urpmq queries
the package database.  The last two are modeled after the parameters
passed to rpm to perform these functions: "-e" = remove, 
"-q" = query, (and "-i" = install, therefore urpmi).
 
> One thing I really like about Debian is that you only need to install
> it once. The rest is auto-upgrades. 

Supposedly you can do this with urpmi by adding the --auto-select
parameter, but I'm not sure if it's as good as apt-get dist-upgrade.

Personally, I think apt (even apt4rpm) is a bit more advanced than
urpmi, but urpmi is getting better all the time.

> Cool. Guess I'll have to put it on my laptop at the InstallFest.

Make sure you check out the SGML stuff beforehand, if that's
one of the main things you do.  I think you might be entirely
right about the sgml stuff in Mandrake being fairly old.  Of 
course, the distribution is mainly put together by volunteer
contributions, so it's just lacking someone to put the packages
together and submit them. ;-)
 
> Thanks for the clarifications.

No problem.  Perhaps you can answer a question for me about Debian.
I tried installing debian a few weeks ago and I couldn't get 
the X server working at all.  (I now have mandrake on the machine
and it works fine, so I know it's not a hardware problem.)  While
I was trying to track down the error, I noticed that Debian
(woody, I think) seems to start X in the startup scripts.  This
is very different from what I'm used to which is how 
mandrake/redhat/sgi irix (iirc) start it in the inittab file.
Why does Debian do it this way and what are the advantages/disadvantages
of both ways?

Thanks,
Tanner
-- 
Tanner Lovelace | lovelace at wayfarer.org | http://wtl.wayfarer.org/
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