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

[Andrew Perrin]

Okay, I can accept that - particularly the install ease. Although
pesonally I'd prefer improving Debian's install over going the all-new
route, but that's just me.  It just seemed to me that Debian's two big
advantages (the guaranteed "all-free"ness and the robustness of apt-get)
were what you were asking for in your original post.

Best,
Andy

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Andrew J Perrin - http://www.unc.edu/~aperrin
Assistant Professor of Sociology, U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
clists at perrin.socsci.unc.edu * andrew_perrin (at) unc.edu


On Tue, 4 Nov 2003, Magnus wrote:

>
> 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.
>