[TriLUG] self-support alternatives to Novell/SUSE & RHEL

[Magnus]

On Tuesday, November 4, 2003, at 10:34  AM, Andrew Perrin wrote:

> Not that I want to start a distro war, but what's wrong with Debian?

I need to tread carefully here because some people can be very 
sensitive about their favorite distributions.

Debian does not yet have a facility as robust as kickstart for 
deploying large numbers of similarly configured machines.

Many people prefer the RPM package management system to Debian's 
system.  Some of the tools that are available for RPM (like yum) are 
every bit as good as the much heralded apt-get.

Having a distro flavored more like Red Hat will make it easier to get 
proprietary applications (like Oracle) to run.  Though of course they 
likely wouldn't be officially supported (at least not until the distro 
built up enough critical mass to leverage their consumer buying power)

Many of us have been using Red Hat Linux or Mandrake and have built a 
set of tools that is geared towards automating the deployment and 
maintenance of large numbers of such systems.  Adapting this model to 
work with Debian would require a complete retooling.  Forking Red Hat 
and/or Mandrake  would make it that much easier to continue to use our 
site-specific tool kits.

And, finally, Debian is just very rough around the edges.  The 
installer is quite difficult and non-linear.  Simple command line tools 
to make complex changes to the system don't seem to be there (who wants 
to muck with PAM settings to authenticate against LDAP & Kerberos when 
you can just run authconfig and check off a couple of menu options?).  
Debian is a very important distro but there is a large cross section of 
the Linux community that it does not appeal to for these reasons and 
more.
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