Re: Debian, too easy?
On Thu, Oct 24, 2002 at 01:02:35PM +0200, Alberto Cabello Sanchez wrote:
> RedHat 6.1 -> Mandrake 7.0 (painless)
> Mandrake 7.0 -> Debian 2.2 (very hard)
> Debian 3.0 -> Slackware 8.0 (rather easy)
>
> Today, I use regularly all of these. I think Slackware is by far more
> "clean" than Debian, but (opposite to RedHat, SuSE, et al.) I can guess
> what Debian makes instead of mine (so, I could do it myself, I think).
I'll just toss a few more (both Linux and non-Linux) datapoints in
there, based on my own experiences and what I've seen in others.
Going from Slackware to commercial UNIX or BSD is easy, but somebody
who's only used Red Hat or Debian will feel much more pain (less with
Debian, though, and a lot less if he knows both).
Going from Slackware to Red Hat is easy but filled with frustration. No
matter how good natured somebody is he'll be swearing like a sailor the
3rd or 4th time he has to recursively grep every file under /etc to find
where they buried the setting for some normally-easy change. Debian has
a similar problem, but not nearly as bad - like somebody else said, it's
sort of a middle ground. The same would probably apply to moving from
commercial UNIX or BSD to RH or Debian.
Somebody who's only used Red Hat can not be trusted to run any other
type of UNIX, and can probably only be marginally trusted to run Linux
systems that aren't loosely based on RH. A number of the "Linux
administrators" I've dealt with who only knew RH were the rough analog
to the Windows NT admins who don't know any of the underlying mechanics
of NT, PC hardware, or networking, but know how to drive a mouse.
Somebody who only knows Linux needs to be very, very careful when
dealing with commercial UNIX. A lot of Linux stuff tends to be very
BSD-ish, and pretty much the entire commercial world is System V. I've
seen and heard of Linux people doing amazingly stupid things that are
actually not completely stupid because that's how you do it on a Linux
machine - they just lacked the experience to know better.
If you want to concentrate on Linux and ignore the rest of the UNIX
world, learn Red Hat plus at least one non-RH-based distribution. RH is
popular because it's got a company behind it, so companies like IBM
certify their products on RH and managers love that magic word
"certified". And to hell with all the bugs. Knowing some other system
will mean that when RH's tools totally mangle your config files you can
figure out how to fix them (or if RH blows up in some new and
interesting way, etc.).
--
Michael Heironimus
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