storm linux distro

[frankiec at unforgettable.com]

Hi James

Judging from there web sight they probably are using a very graphical
installer.  Having been a slackware user, of versions 4 and 7, and now a
debian user also, I find that things might be a bit different but Linux is
Linux.  I know people who really like redhat also.  

Right now I see know reason why anyone would want to run anything other
then one of these three.  Most others right now are just ripping off there
packaging tools anyways.  The only difference is really the gui.  

I don't want to start a religious war here either.  So I am going to say
up front, no distribution bashing.  

My findings are that slackware has a really nice graphical or text
installer.  Both of them work well with speech.  Both of them are user
friendly.  Debian has a great packaging system.  Unlike any other it goes
and gets the packages for you, configures them and installs them.  Redhat
does have a nice packaging system but you still have to hunt down the rpm
files yourself.  With slackware most software isn't in the distro you
have to build from source yourself.  This is nice at first, but becomes a
pain when upgrading.  Perhaps the nicest feature of debian is the
distupgrade.  One can type "apt-get update" and then "apt-get
distupgrade" and get the latest greatest packages with out any user
intervention.  I have also found the debian has the most up to date
libraries and compilers of any of these three.  

Debian's install is to large for my tastes.  Be where that you will need
to either have two boot disks and the rest of the base packages on your
hard disk already, or you are going to be using one hell of a lot of
floppies.  Five just to et support for all of the hardware and the
installation package.  From there you can pull down the 15 mb base tgz
file from http after getting your network up.  I think that the disks
should contain groups of driver, one could be network drivers etc.  
Slackware pulls off using a three disk system.  Neither of them really
take advantage of modules the way I would think they could.  Slackware
makes you have to get a different boot disk if you have SCSI devices.  
Where debian just makes you put all the drivers for all of the devices on
disks.  It seems to me like debian could have one boot disk, one SCSI
modules disk, one network disk, and one root disk, and be down to four at
least.  The disks at this point are not full, so I do see how that they
could make this happen.  In most cases people would then only need three
disks unless they had SCSI drives.

Then there's the redhat boot disks.  Which also have a little bit of
trouble.  It seems as though you can't just use there boot disk kernel for
a running system.  They use a different version of the modules then they do
on the boot disk itself.

So now I must say that I think that Debian is the nicest system once it is
up and running.  Slackware is a bitch to upgrade and redhat is in the
middle.  The init system of debian is certainly the cleanest, slackware's
is much more simple, and I personally think that redhat's is ridiculous.

Hope this helped someone.  I have installed linux on many machines now so
the installation process means a lot to me.  One of the hardest things to
do is give tech support to your friends who are trying out linux for the
first time.  Using a bad installation program just makes matters even
worse.  You end up having to basically install it for them.  I personally
think that slackware has the best newbie installation program.  It doesn't
do anything you don't ask it to and it has great help messages that walk
you through the whole process.

 Frank


On Sat, 10 Jun 2000, James Ruby wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> have anyone of you ever looked at storm http://www.stormix.com as it is easier to installed.  Guess it is based on debian.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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