On Monday 17 October 2005 04.20, stephen horvath wrote: > I do have a question that I have not received an answer. > What is the real difference in what is referred to as Red > Hat based or Debian based? As you've certainly noticed by now, the actual application programs (KDE, Gnome, The Gimp, OpenOffice.org etc.) are the same on both RedHat and Debian-based systems (and, for that matter, on Mandriva and Novell/SuSE, too - those are not really RedHat based anymore today.) The principal difference is in how software packages are distributed. On Windows, you had '.cab' files or self-extracting '.exe' files with (most often) an InstallShield based installer program (or similar.) On Debian based systems, you have '.deb' files, on RedHat/SuSE/Mandriva you have '.rpm' files. Between Red Hat, SuSE and Mandriva, while the package format is te same, the package names and the dependencies between the packages differ (ok, this is now becoming quite technical - as a user, you can just ignore that.) Another difference between the Linux distributions is the installer (I mean the system installer - what you see when you first boot from the distribution CD) - even within the 'Debian family' (Debian, Knoppix, Xandros, MEPIS, Ubuntu, ...) there are differencies. Also, the way to change system settings (set up Internet access, install additional programs, ...) once you have installed your system is different. I hope this helps to satisfy your curiosity. greetings Adrian -- Of course I know how to copy disks. Where's the xerox machine?
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