[techtalk] SuSE -> Mandrake?

[Jeff]

On Mon, Feb 14, 2000 at 05:23:49PM -0800, Linda Walsh wrote:
> I'm thinking I'd like to convert my mail server
> and laptop from SuSE to Mandrake.  Mandrake has better/easier to use
> configuration (chkconfig) and security settings/options.  It's also
> compiled for 586's and above, yielding speed improvements.

From what I've heard, having everything compiled native 586 isn't all that great of a speed improvement.  You'd get more out of recompiling the kernel to 586 native, and then recompiling some of the more often used components with heavy optimization, like the Xserver with -O6 or something crazy like that ;)

I haven't played with chkconfig, but then again, I'm a purist, my favorit config program is vim.

> 
> So the big question is how do I do it.  I have partitions /tmp, /var, /home
> (/usr/src is a softlink to inside /home), /boot and /.  

Hmm, I would heavily suggest backing up.  Other than that, I have no suggestions.  I'm going to be doing a massive reinstall of my machine (heavily upgraded SuSE 5.3 install to SuSE 6.3), my tactic is to install to a new harddrive and then migrate away from the old harddrive (moving the configuration files, my home directory, my source code, the webpage, etc).  It'll get used as raw storage, but I'm in a spot where I'm getting a new drive, and I will have the option to upgrade while maintaining my working install.

> 
> So it seems I have to worry primarily about "/" and "/var".
> 
> I sorta dread the idea of re-setting back up the mail stuff and host
> configuration, but I'm sorta thinking I may have to scratch / and /var
> because even an upgrade from RH61 (supposedly compatible) to MDK 7.0 resulted
> in alot of services not coming up due to errors (including networking).  
> Fortunately that was on a scratch machine, so I could just mkfs and 
> start over; icky idea, though, on my mail, source and build machine.
> 
> I think one thing that pissed my off about SuSE was it's non-standard
> setup stuff -- putting all the scripts under /sbin/rc.d instead of in

This, IMHO, is a matter of taste.  I like the /sbin location better.  A lot of the other Unixen use /sbin (DigitalUnix -- now Tru64, Solaris, HP/UX 10).  Then again, Irix and SCO both use /etc.  *BSD doesn't even use inittab (they have a handful of sh scripts, /etc/rc, /etc/rc.local, /etc/rc.boot, sometimes located in /sbin).  Then there are HP/UX 9 and AIX which make the SysV init act like a BSD init.  

Actually, you can get a BSD styled init for linux, it is called simpleinit, but I have never actually seen it used, I think Slackware was the last distrobution to use it (but I might be wrong on this).

> /etc.  But then, to make it worse, they have a README about their startup
> philosophy that talked about 'init' being the *father* of all processes.
> I've always called it the parent process -- assigning a gender to a process
> just seems downright silly -- processes use fission to reproduce.  It's 
> an asexual process.  Anyway, the father thing bugged me. 


> 
> Ideas on conversion?  There is a linux filesystem hierarchy standard and
> I'll just bet SuSE doesn't conform.

I haven't heard of one.  The LSB has one in the works, but nothing yet.  Besides, SuSE is a member of the LSB.  

As far as I can tell, SuSE doesn't have any file system quirks (I compile a lot of software myself, and I have yet to have a package that complains about anything.  All the standard include/ and lib/ directories are there, and included in the include paths for GCC, and ld.so.conf).

-- 
Jeff
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