[Techtalk] Which distro?

[Mary]

On Thu, Jan 09, 2003, WolfRyder wrote:
> The second is, are there any other Linux recommendations that have easy 
> software  updates? (I'm even considering FreeBSD.) I also need to know 
> because whatever I decide to use at home I'm installing at work....yes, at 
> long last I have the requested computer to convert into a database server 
> (Yeah!) but it needs to be easy to maintain, update and secure...not asking 
> much, am I?   ;-) The guy I'm working with on this is leaving it to my 
> judgement so I really need to make a good decision here. He's never worked 
> with linux and I would like it to be a "pleasurable linux experience" for 
> him (and me!).

Debian has a system that is quite good at handling incremental upgrades.

If you had a Debian system, the upgrade process would be:

# apt-get update

to update the list of available packages

# apt-get dist-upgrade

to upgrade to the new version of all installed packages

or

# apt-get install mysql-server apache

to update (install will update an already installed package) just apache
and mysql-server.

Now, Debian's disadvantages:

 - updates are provided *all the time*. If you want to keep a Debian
   system current, it's a fair bit of bandwidth. Of course, you could
   just update every few months, which would make it more like any other
   distro.

 - the install is text-only, and doesn't do much hardware
   identification. I think it's gotten a bit better, but if you don't
   know the module for your soundcard etc etc, a Debian install won't
   tend to identify it for you. It is very unfriendly to people who
   aren't comfortable with doing disk paritioning etc.

 - currently, some packages in Debian aren't as good as they could be.
   The X software releases (GNOME2, KDE3 etc) are now somewhat behind
   other major distributions, although the GNOME Debian people (don't
   know about KDE, I'm not on their mailing list) are working hard.

 - Debian's upgrades are interactive - that is you need to sit there
   while the packages are installing, and answer questions like "should
   sshd run at startup?" and "this configuration file has changed in the
   new version? should I update it?" It remembers your answers to
   questions you've answered before, but there are sometimes new
   questions

 - the stable version of Debian is seldom released. If you want a
   reasonably uptodate system, you need Debian's testing version.
   testing is probably more or less as stable as point releases of other
   distributions, but they don't guarentee that. Probably not a good
   idea to run dist-upgrade all them time.

Other distributions, certainly Mandrake and Red Hat, are providing better
network upgrade tools (urpmi/rpmdrake and up2date respectively) than
they used to, maybe some people will review them.

-Mary