down for the count

[Jacob Schmude]

Hi
	This is mearly my own personal experiences, but I think you'd be
better off with slackware. I have gotten debian to install, but it's a
somewhat tricky process. I tried it recently, though, and it wouldn't boot
correctly on the upgraded machine. I kept getting the message
init: respawning too fast, disabled for five minutes. I don't know what
this means, but slackware does not seem to do this. I've always been able
to install slackware flawlessly and am happily running it perfectly.
	The good side of debian, assuming you get it to work, is the
package manager. It handles packages very nicely indeed, certainly better
than rpm or any other packager. dependencies are taken care of for you
automatically, and you can upgrade the whol thing through the net with two
commands. However, I've found slackware to be more convenient, especially
it's init structure. I find the system V init-style scripts used by debian
and red hat annoying. Slackware has about four scripts, which you edit
manually. Debian's number varies depending on how many packages you
install, and then you need to worry about symlinks. I hate the runlevel
directories, there's symlinks all over the place. Six directories to
manage instead of one. I know debian has update-rc.d, but it has failed me
before. Slackware also has System V init capability in version 7.0 and
later, which is useful if you install some commercial software that
expects this init style, but the main init is through four scripts,
sometimes five.
	What I find most annoying about debian, however, is the fact that
you can't edit /etc/mailcap manually. It just gets overwritten. You need
to go in and create a file in /usr/lib/mime/packages containing the lines
and then run update-mime. However, you can't name the file anything, it
needs to be the name of an already installed package. This does not apply
to any other distribution I know of. Of course the problem with this is
that if that package wants to place its own version of a file there, it
will and if your options are set wrong, will do this without warning
you. You may get asked, or you may not. It depends.

Jacob


On Sat, 30 Sep 2000, Charles Hallenbeck wrote:

> 
> Hi Jacob...
> 
> I am torn between upgrading to a current Slackware or switching to Debian. I
> have not talked to Dell yet so I do not know what what distro they have
> built in. I am really tired of messing with kludgy hardware and a solid
> platform would be nice for a change.