Re: Article: Debian's Daunting Installation
On Thu, Oct 05, 2000 at 04:47:46PM -0400, mike wrote:
> There is another way to get Debian potato up and running
> quickly with a nice GUI install.
> Just d/l the free 'hail' distro from stormix.com or get their
> cd and you'll be apt-get'ting in about a half-hour. You can then
I was never able to get stormix to install. I e-mailed them, and they
finally replied a month later. The guy said something like, "Oh, yeah,
we've been having problems figuring out SCSI, but we'll fix it one of
these days." I left them to their fixing and tell people to steer clear
of stormix. :-)
I've done a lot of installs with a lot of distros and flavors of unix.
Some are harder than others, but it seems that the place where people
get stuck is _after_ the install. "Ok, what do I do now?"
Solaris is pretty hard to figure out if you're not used to it. It's also
a lot easier if you have an already working Solaris machine you can look
at if you get stuck.
Unixware had some non-obvious things that needed to be done after
install, then I had to fight to compile what I needed. (Not many people
worry about make targets for unixware...)
OpenBSD was kind of a bear. It pretty much just installed to the hard drive
and left all other setup to the user.
OpenSTEP was mixed. Some things were really easy, others I had to fight
with. Then I had to unlearn some of the things I knew from other unix
systems.
RedHat, Mandrake, and SuSE are all quite easy to install and start
using. I find they only get difficult later on when you need to fix
something that broke, or want to upgrade. They can also become a real
mess if you install un-official packages.
Debian and FreeBSD are both easy to install, easy to start using, and
easy to maintain. You can stick to a stable branch, or you can track the
bleeding edge. I actually prefer FreeBSD for its ports system and cvsup.
But FreeBSD is a source-based distro, where Linux is binary
distribution.
I have to wonder if the GPL is at the root of this. It seems that GPLed
stuff is made available in binary form and then the source is an
afterthought - like they were grudgingly forced to offer it to you. :-)
I know that's an exaggeration, but still...
I did write to Linuxworld and said that I thought the article by Barr
was unfair. I pointed out what I felt were the flaws, and
suggested how it could have been done better. The editor thanked me and
said that my comments were being forwarded to the author. (I got the
impression that other people submitted comments that went into a
blackhole because they were abusive.)
--
Stuart Krivis
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