Hello, On Wed, Apr 14, 2004 at 08:50:40AM -0500, John Goerzen wrote: > Yes, I'm aware that apt-rpm exists, but usually when one speaks of > apt-get, one is implicitly referring to the Debian packaging system and > the dpkg components as well. The major RPM players (RH, SuSE) do not, > AFAIK, ship any version of apt-get with their systems. Yes, but people getting more involved sooner or later will try out some automatic update method. Some like SUSE's version, some like yum, but others will switch to apt-get. No problem. > > > In general, the differences between Debian and other distros will also > > > apply in the general case -- that is, Debian vs. RedHat on the PC will > > > have similar differences as you see here. > > > > "PC" have no distinct models (as Jensen, LX, Rawhide,XP1000) which is > > the classifying factor in the alpha world; there you rather look at > > components (which chipset, ...). Of course, since alphas can be > > expanded, similar issues araise there as well. > > Not really. Once the machine is booted, it's all pretty much the same. > I have one Alpha, two PowerPC machines, an Athlon64, and a Pentium M > laptop. Once installed and booted, there's no perceptible difference. > I have KDE on all of the above; it runs fine. I use JFS or Reiser all > over. No problems there either. They all support PCI (save the laptops > of course), so I can mix and match expansion cards. And this is really > the whole point of a portable system anyway. Yes, exactly the point. The original poster wrote: distro I could get up and running without kernel panic at best was DEBIAN's distro. Of course, looking at userland (KDE, shell) I could equally well sit on a FreeBSD machine, so really the tools are only visisble to the sysadmin and each ported OS will strive (and usually suceed) to make the tools as generic as possible, i.e. hiding hardware problems. And when people talk about RedHat vs. Debian they often (but not always) compare the tools. Then platform really doesn't matter. This is actually one reason for me to use Debian, because it supports so many platforms. Btw. some (many?) laptops use PCI internally, they just don't tell you (and no slot to expand in). > > > Debian seems to be the operating system that supports the widest range > > > of Alpha hardware, since it can boot from both MILO and aboot. This is > > > something that, AFAIK, the neither the BSDs nor Gentoo have mastered. > > > RedHat long ago dropped Alpha support. I don't know if Slackware really > > > > But Compaq still maintains a branch which was made from RedHat; given > > Are you sure about that? They actually maintain it? Last time I was > playing around on the old DEC FTP site, little had been touched since > 1999 or so. Please search AXP-Lists for pointers, the download URLS have been posted there many times and security updates are posted regularly. I don't know if you can buy support if you need to. > > that there was recently some effort by RedHat employees to get Fedora > > running on alpha, I would not call it "dead". It just has an uncertain > > future. So for playing, I would not rule it out. > > No, it is dead now. They discontinued Alpha support some *years* back. To be precise, security support ran out last year March for RedHat linux proper. But then, the Compaq supported product still exists. Greetings Helge -- Helge Kreutzmann, Dipl.-Phys. Helge.Kreutzmann@itp.uni-hannover.de gpg signed mail preferred gpg-key: finger kreutzm@zibal.itp.uni-hannover.de 64bit GNU powered http://www.itp.uni-hannover.de/~kreutzm Help keep free software "libre": http://www.freepatents.org/
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