Re: Which OS? Was "I do consider Ubuntu to be Debian" , Ian Murdock

[Joe Hart <j.hart@orange.nl>]

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Michael M. wrote:
> On Sat, 2007-03-31 at 19:39 +0200, Joe Hart wrote:
> 
>> The problem with Ubuntu is that while it is based on Debian, several key
>> items are different (restricted modules, sudo/root, etc.) to make it not
>> appealing to many Debian purists.  Sidux on the other hand offers 100%
>> compatibility with Debian, and some really smart people helping smooth
>> any bumps one might experience with it.  Sidux is Sid, with a custom
>> kernel and a few really good scripts.
>>
>> For Debian people who might be afraid of running Sid, Sidux might be
>> just the answer that they were looking for.  However, I would have to
>> admit that it might be dangerous, and Etch is the safe bet.  It might
>> not have the latest packages, but it will work as promised.
> 
> 
> What would be the differences between running Sidux and Sid?  The [1]
> "Why Should I Use Sidux?" page seems to stress security & package
> timeliness over stability, so I'm wondering whether Sidux is any more
> stable than Sid.  It kind of sounds like the main purpose of Sidux is to
> provide a shortcut to Sid, without having to install Debian stable or
> testing and upgrading.  Am I missing something?
> 
> "100% compatibility with Debian" is a good -- actually, a great --
> thing, in my book.  I used the late, lamented Libranet for a time,
> before using Debian proper, and I thought the compatibility factor was
> very important in making it an excellent distro.  Most distros forked
> off Debian don't aim for that.
> 
> But it looks like Sidux uses KDE.  Would it work just as well with
> Gnome, or are some Sidux alterations so KDE-oriented that there'd be no
> point to using the distro if you weren't a KDE user?  (I'm not.)
> 
> [1] http://sidux.com/index.php?module=pnWikka&tag=whysidux
> 
> 

Michael,

Yes, it defaults to KDE, but that does not mean you can't use any WM
that you want.  If you're planning on using something other than KDE,
then the lite version is better because it has less KDE things that you
would probably want to remove anyway.  Since the repos are the same,
anything you can install in Sid, you can install in Sidux.

The main scripts are quite generic.  Things like installing the
proprietary drivers for your video card to fixing fonts to
meta-packages.  The best one of the lot is du-fixes-h2.sh, which
unfortunately doesn't come on the Chaos CD due to an oversight from the
dev team.  It will be on the next release which is due in a few weeks.

That script walks one through all sorts of things from installing new
kernels to performing dist-upgrades.  It also offers plenty of tweaks to
the system such as removing unneeded locales.  It is a fine piece of
work that is constantly being updated (it updates itself).

The only caveat to the whole distro, as I see it is that it is German
based, so a lot of the information that is available is only in German,
and without translating services, English speaking people could miss
things.  The devs all speak English, and will answer questions put to
them in English in English, but they revert back to German to talk
amongst themselves so one cannot always understand what they are saying
if they can't read German.

To see what I mean, just join the #sidux channel on irc.oftc.net

Since it is Sid, you can expect that Greg is right about there being a
roller coaster soon, so it will be interesting to see what happens.
Since it is a new distribution, there is no real telling as to what will
happen, but know that many of the devs were formerly with Kanotix, and
that had a pretty good reputation.  Kanotix for the moment is stagnant,
but should be revived in a few weeks when Kano gets things straightened out.

Since it is a live CD, you can try it.  You can even use the fromiso
cheat code so you don't even have to burn the CD.

Joe

PS.  Keep in mind that I have on this computer, Etch in another
partition "just in case".  But I haven't used it in weeks.

- --
Registerd Linux user #443289 at http://counter.li.org/
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