Re: Debian is not a "main distro"?
Jarrod Henry <magnwa@lionking.org> writes:
> On 30 Sep 1998, Steve Dunham wrote:
>
> > Not me, it takes me under 10 minutes to install a rather complete
> > RedHat system (incl. about 5 minutes to install all of the packages)
> > and at least an hour to install Debian.
> What you DON'T mention is how Redhat installs EVERY THING. For example,
> if you select mail, you get EVERY MAIL READER MADE. Plus, it opens up all
> the services, typically. Including the VERY fun imapd.
You can select individual packages, and you can easily customize those
components. After installing the packages, Red Hat 5.1 presents you
with a nice interactive (newt-based) program that allows you to select
what gets started at boot time. (The program can be run at anytime as
"ntsysv" and what is does is create and delete the symlinks for the
init scripts. The runlevels and number for the symlinks are specified
in comments in the init scripts.) I believe this was the case with
Red Hat 5.0 too.
As far as IMAP goes, Debian is _worse_ than Red Hat. RedHat provides
a nice program, "ntsysv", that allows you to enable and disable that
stuff - Debian enables and starts any and all daemons that you have
installed, and often will restart them when you upgrade, even if they
have been manually disabled. (See recent discussions on debian-devel
about this.)
Regarding "if you select mail, you get EVERY MAIL READER MADE": if you
use the "package sets" in Debian Hamm, you get two or three different
versions of emacs. And "every mail reader made" is a lot smaller than an
additional copy of emacs.
Also, it is trivial to make a customized version of the Red Hat
install, and it is easy to completely automate the installs.
> Point is, if you are installing a Unix, you don't WANT to do it in
> 10 minutes. That's too fast. You'll miss something, and often it
> will compromise the security of your box. Debian steps you through
> all parts. ANd so what if it byte compiles stuff?
It takes a damn long time, especially on my Pentium-75 laptop. What's
the point of binary packages, if they have to be recompiled during
installation?
The last time I tried to install Debian on my laptop I gave up after
a few hours of postinstall scripts and installed Red Hat. (30min on
my laptop - I wanted to go home.)
I'm going to compromise the security of my box because I don't want to
wait to recompile elisp files and tex formats? This is starting to
sound like the old Macintosh "you don't need color" arguments - making
up nonsensical arguments to avoid admitting a shortcoming in the system.
Red Hat has advantages over Debian, Debian has advantages over RedHat.
For me, the problems in Debian are less annoying than the problems in
RedHat, so I use Debian. But I still point out the problems with
Debian on the Debian lists and the problems with RedHat on the RedHat
lists.
Steve
dunham@cse.msu.edu
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