[Techtalk] Same old question -- which distro?

[Telsa Gwynne]

On Wed, Jan 29, 2003 at 11:35:12PM -0500 or thereabouts, Brenda Bell wrote:
> Michelle Murrain wrote:
> >At 8:37 PM -0500 1/29/03, Brenda Bell wrote:
> >
> >However, if you've got 
> >some unusual things, you really do need to know exactly what the drivers 
> >are that are needed, because Debian isn't always so great at 
> >auto-discovery.
> 
> I suppose I should have included this info in my original post.  I have 
> standard (e.g., commonly used) ***everything***.  Intel MOBO with 
> integrated Ether 100 Pro and ATI Rage 128.  No weird stuff.

:) 
 
> I biggest concern is probably server software:  Apache, php, qmail, 
> courier-imap, SquirrelMail, OpenLDAP and MySQL.  Again, no weird stuff.

Most of these I believe are on RH. The only one I haven't actually
seen in SquirrelMail, but a friend uses that and I believe he uses
RH.

A hop to your local RH ftp mirror and looking at the listing in
the directory with all the rpms will tell you whether they're all
there. I have some vague memory that Apache might be packaged
under the name httpd or some such.

> >I think the truth about Linux distros at this point in time is that it 
> >really all is about personal preference
> 
> This is one of my problems... I'm curious about Debian, but it sounds so 
>  different from what I'm used to.

I've griped about this before. While there are "Linux for Windows
users" books and cheatsheets and lists of where things differ,
there are no "Debian for RH users, or RH for Debian users" things
that I've seen except for some extremely amateurish "I've been
using Linux for two weeks and $distro is better than $other_distro"
comparisons. 

I have used RH since about version 5.x. (I was using it before then,
but in the loosest possible sense of 'use': I typed 'elm' a lot on
my husband's computer.) So I have accumulated a lot of trivia and
preconceptions about "how Linux does it" which is very RH-specific.
Periodically I try other distros, generally Debian, to remind myself
which bits are common to most distros and which are distro-specific.
I have a Debian box kicking around atm, actually, although it 
drastically needs updating. So I can tell you what I met that 
was immediately different. 

> >If you are 
> >familiar with Mandrake, but worried about their future, Red Hat is an 
> >easy shift, because they are so similar.
> 
> Exactly the sort of feedback I was looking for.  Thanks.

They're very similar in both using rpm for package management. 
Differences I recall between Mandrake and RH tend to be things 
like default MTA, default printing set-up, and then rpm front-ends. 
And the GUI admin tools. Very different. But they both write
to the same text files underneath, so if you want to just edit
those, you can do that. 

RH -> Debian differences I spotted last time I installed were
along similar lines: different MTA again (RH uses sendmail; Mandrake
uses PostFix; Debian has exim, so clearly Debian wins here :)),
and then -- of course -- package-management.

With all of those distros, though, you can generally find a
version of your favourite tool packaged by someone: Debian 
and Mandrake are both known to package everything under the
sun; and as RH decrease what they ship so they can support
it, more and more people maintain packages of dropped apps
for their own convenience and make them available for others.

Telsa