down for the count

[philwh at gate.net]

I just want to drop my 0.001 cent in here.
The company I work for just bought one of the dells with
linux preinstalled. it was redhat by the way.
the first console does come up with x-windows,
but you can change to another virtual console and get a
text login.
I had to configure it as a ppp server,
and it wasn't an easy task. redhat isn't the most friendly
linux distribution to work with.
i agree with others here, stick with slackware.
I run 4 machines with slackware at home,and hav never had
a problem. whereas at work, I must use redhat,
and seem to have problems installing any package
that doesn't happen to come in an rpm package.
and, i wasn't overly impressed with the dell machine either.
it came as a desktop machine, and didn't seem to be very upgradable.
although this may have been the fault of the i t person that ordered it.

phil

On Sat, Sep 30, 2000 at 02:27:12PM -0600, Charles Hallenbeck wrote:
> 
> On 2000-09-30 speakup at braille.uwo.ca said:
>    >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.
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> Jacob -
> Those are helpful observations. I have only used Slackware in the past -
> 2.0, 3.0, 3.5, and now 4.0, so I know its structure pretty well and may just
> stick with it. It is the awkwardness of upgrading that tempts me to switch.
> Chuck.
> 
> 
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