Re: Change from SuSE to Debian
Hi Pete,
On Mon, 11 Mar 2002 19:36:05 +0000, pete atkinson wrote:
>I have been running SuSE in various releases for the last 3
>years and like(d)
>to think I had a good grasp of what was going on.
I'm a fellow SuSEer. Finally got tired of RPM hell so I'm here
trying on a Debian coat. So far its been rough, plenty of
difference between Debian and most of the other RPM based
distros.
>Boy ! what a difference - I am plodding through various
>HOWTO's and have
>configured my display and network card successfully (big deal
>some might say
>!) but the thing that is getting me is the whole culture
>change between the
>relatively spoon fed SuSE and the somewhat (to me) esoteric
>Debian.
Yep. Its a blast isn't it? I never found SuSE to be too big
on the spoon feeding myself, but then I never -ever- used YAST2
(the GUI thing).
What I found and liked about SuSE was that it gave a really
good amount of granularity on the install package selection,
yet didnt bog you down too much in the tiny and (after a while)
annoying basic stuff.
I usually just installed a minimum system (about 80MB), then
built on that for the purpose the server was for. Better yet,
when building server farms I'd make liberal use of the
'save/load config' option and just build all the boxes with
exactly the same software even across widely different
hardware.
However, sysadmining many SuSE (or any RPM) box's is hell. Its
easy, but immensely time consuming. YAST1 falls down badly in
this area. I never tried YOU, the online update thing.
I'm not so much a refugee from SuSE as I am from RPM.
Having said that though, I've been tremendously unhappy with
the stability and production quality of all the SuSE distro's
since V6.4
>Are there any hints/tips/watch-out-fors that you could offer,
>principally, I
>am a bit confused over the non-RPMness of packages and the
>lack of the config
>suites such as YAST/YAST2 that SusE employs.
Can't help you here as I'm stuck in the same quagmire. Looking
for admin tools that just are not there - thats fine though, I
always hated them but I'm lazy :))
After jumping in with both feet and no idea I've now come to
the conclusion that the best thing for a new Debianite to do is
to learn -all- about dselect, apt and dpkg. I don't mean skim
over it, learn everything. The whole Debian distro seems to be
intimately linked to the packaging system (as they all are).
The .deb packaging system and APT in particular would appear to
be reason enough on their own to make the switch to this
distro, but using them effectively is non trivial and takes a
committment I never had to come up with before when using SuSE.
Best regards,
Craig
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