[TriLUG] Server: Debian or Mandrake?

[crimsun at fungus.sh.nu]

On Tue, Apr 22, 2003 at 12:48:14PM -0400, Tarus Balog wrote:
> 1) Serve files (via Samba)
> 2) Security
> 3) screen (haven't used it - seems cool)
> 4) Ease of maintenance

Although I'm an avid Debian cheerleader, I honestly think you'll have
fewer headaches by choosing Mandrake. If one of the most important goals
is to have the system(s) up and running in a reasonably short amount of
time, then you'll want the installer to do a fine job of "detecting" the
hardware (which means the installation kernel(s) has(have) to support
your hardware). With Debian, this can be somewhat painful, but the bf2.4
kernels (http://people.debian.org/~blade/XFS-Install/download/new/) do a
good job of supporting non-standard (i.e. stuff most teenagers use)
hardware, and since you have a nice Internet connection, pulling base
from over the network will be relatively painless. That said, my not-so-
recent experience with Mandrake demonstrates that they have a terrific
installer, quite streamlined with good support (via backported and
forward-ported patches) in the installation kernel(s?), reasonably
current security updates [actually their recent track record for the
"big" vulnerabilities has been, shamefully, more explicitly direct than
Debian's, <insert excuse>], and very straight-forward (breeze?)
maintenance via urpmi, apt-rpm, and so on. _That_ said, Debian Woody and
Mandrake 9.[01?] are pretty much a toss-up, so imo the decision comes to
ease-of-install.

-Dan

-- 
Dan Chen                crimsun at fungus.sh.nu
GPG key: www.unc.edu/~crimsun/pubkey.gpg.asc