Re: Linux article in Sunworl
On Sun, Jan 04, 1998 at 04:48:54PM -0800, George Bonser wrote:
> On Mon, 5 Jan 1998, Hamish Moffatt wrote:
> > Nice, although the "Linux is not Solaris" theme came through a bit strong.
> > Also, I don't remember there being a Pentium _II_ bug, as the article
> > mentioned. Caldera, Redhat and (ugh) Slackware all got a mention,
> > but Debian didn't, despite mention of the space shuttle.
>
> I used the feedback form at the bottom of the article to "educate" the
> author. You might find it interesting that Slackware has fallen from the
> #1 distribution in use to #3 judging solely from my non-professional
> impression from various newsgroup postings and other indicators. It
> appears that a lot of Slackware systems are being "upgraded" to other
> distributions including Red Hat, Debian, SUsE, and Caldera. Not sure
> where Yggdrasil falls, it is very difficult to find clear evidance of
> Yggdrasil systems on the net.
I did a spot of Linux consulting last week; customer (my ISP)
had a Slackware system that seemed to hang during boot. fscked correctly
etc, ran bash fine (with init=/bin/bash on the command line) but
none of the emergency, single or normal modes would come up.
There were two problems; /dev/console was gone. They'd added some start
up messages to the scripts (rc.S etc) to see how far it was getting
but none of them came out, so it looked like it didn't get that far.
But it was loading the modules, which is done right at the bottom of
Slackware's rc.S. Turns out you none of the messages can come out
without a /dev/console. Debian doesn't recreate this if it is missing
either; might be a nice touch.
The other problem was that they'd compiled and installed mySQL
themselves, and forgotten the & on the line in the script to load it,
so it seemed to hang. Of course, Debian does all this for you, so no
issue.
I took the opportunity to bag Slackware. (They are NT and Solaris
people anyway.) Slackware seems to be to me almost unmaintainable;
removing software completely is difficult, worse than Windows possibly.
Although it's possible that Solaris people are used to installing
additional software from sources anyway, so it isn't an issue.
Hamish
--
Hamish Moffatt, hamish@debian.org, hamish@rising.com.au, hmoffatt@mail.com
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