Re: just curious about Debian vs Redhat
On Wed, 27 Oct 1999, aphro wrote:
> - many software products are designed for it and don't support other
> distributions, not just software(applications) but drivers too. examples
> would be drivers for DPT raid controllers and 3com network adapters(the
DPT raid controller drivers, I know, are distributed in source form. I
cannot think of any reason they would work with a RedHat kernel and not a
Debian kernel, as RedHat doesn't (AFAIK) currently modify the kernel.
I don't know about 3com drivers, but aren't there drivers for all 3com
cards already in the kernel as it comes from Linus?
> ones from 3com) come in binary form and depend on you using the kernel
> that comes with redhat. while this is not(probably) redhat's direct
> fault
Even if you do use a binary driver, it ought to work with any kernel of
the version range it was designed to work with, RedHat or otherwise.
And you're right - it's not RedHat's fault.
> - they jump too quickly into adopting new software. i was kinda pissed
> when they adopted glibc before most everyone else, most people started
I don't agree here either. Someone has to adopt glibc first. If no one
adopts it, no one will work the bugs out and it will never be ready for
use.
RedHat always maintains the current and previous major version of their
release, at least for security and major bugfixes. If you aren't ready to
move up to the new version, just use the previous one.
That said, there was a lot of trouble going from libc5 to glibc. But
there was plenty of trouble going from libc4 to libc5, too. There's
always problems when the C library changes versions.
The update to glibc 2.1 seems to be a lot smoother- probably because the
change is less.
> d/l a binary for redhat 6 ..you can't run it on glibc2.0 ..i also have
> read that when they first adopted GNOME it was still quite buggy and
> crashed often.
RedHat refused to use KDE because of the license. It is the same with
Debian, I might add. They have also put a great deal of effort into
helping the Gnome project. And nobody was forced to use Gnome, either.
I'm still using basically the same X configuration - window manager and
all - that I used with Slackware 3 way back in 1996. All I had to do was
replace my .fvwmrc in my home directory and my /etc/XF86Config.
Debian is a little different from RedHat - but if you ask me, the primary
difference between the two at this point is RedHat's commercial focus vs.
Debian's free software focus.
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