New Member

[al Sten-Clanton]

Hi, Michael:

I'm especially interested in this observation about Arch Linux:

"(one thing though in this bit I am unsure whether I like or not is that
unlike debian it puts the whole of a software package in one package, eg.
Arch only has a brltty package including development headers, bindings, etc
where as debian puts each part of brltty in separate packages)."

I didn't know this.  What do you see as the down side of that?  I may be
wrong, but this implies to me that more things required to be together would
actually be together.  The times I've had to do it with other distros,
searching for all the packages I needed to make a thing work was a
nuisance--or a failure.

Al 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: speakup-bounces at braille.uwo.ca [mailto:speakup-bounces at braille.uwo.ca]
On Behalf Of Michael Whapples
Sent: Sunday, March 14, 2010 7:10 PM
To: trev.saunders at gmail.com
Cc: Speakup is a screen review system for Linux.; orca-list at gnome.org
Subject: Re: New Member

Hello,
May be a quick history of my time on Linux. Originally I started out on
slackware, mainly because of slackware containing speakup on its standard
install CDs. Slackware gave a good base system and I got to like the way it
did things. However slackware has got some problems, dependency checking is
very weak, its not one of the distros commonly targeted by software
developers so you sometimes have extra work to install some third party
software and it lacked gnome. I had a bit of a look around trying a number
of distros, ubuntu, gentoo and finally settling down with GRML (essentially
debian with a few extra packages). 
GRML is very good as a LiveCD but it can become a bit much to maintain (its
based on debian unstable, you have other packages from the GRML repository
which can lead to conflicts, etc). Possibly if debian had more accessible
install options I would say debian is very good (NOTE: 
my comment on accessible install relates to recommending it to those who may
not have a hardware synthesiser or Braille display, the espeakup enabled
disc Samuel made didn't seem to have the volume raised on my computer and I
couldn't find a volume controll app to raise it).

Now for ArchLinux, they have many reasons on their wiki and a description of
how Arch compares to other distributions. May be its my use of slackware and
debian which makes ArchLinux nice to me. Things I like about it include,
technical simplicity (its possible to make the package manager in Arch have
a preferred order of repositories but simple to specify a package from a
specific repository should you want
that) and the flexibility it offers (one thing though in this bit I am
unsure whether I like or not is that unlike debian it puts the whole of a
software package in one package, eg. Arch only has a brltty package
including development headers, bindings, etc where as debian puts each part
of brltty in separate packages). Although gentoo may offer greater
flexibility in how the packages are compiled I personally found very little
gain in that compared to the time spent for it compiling the packages (NOTE:
I am talking for desktop/laptop systems, normally compiling on their own
processors).

Michael Whapples
On 03/14/2010 05:26 AM, trev.saunders at gmail.com wrote:
> Hi,
>
> SO my current view on distros is the following.  I have two general use
cases.
> Case 1:
> This is mostly servers, but also personal machines for other people and
such where I want to do as little maintanance as posible.  I also want a
stable basic system that general is fairly small.  FOr these system I use
debian either stable or testing depending on exact needs.
>
> case 2:
> System which will be heavily customized to fit my exact needs.  For these
systems I care about how things are configured, and am willing to put energy
into configuring them.  For these machines I run gentoo, accept my laptop
which will become a gentoo box soon.
>
>  From what I saw on the arch wiki it looks like arch is somewhere between
these  two.  It looks like debian meets my need for a system I can setup and
basically let run with the occasional update better with far less effort.
It looks like arch's use of binary packages will make it not customizeable
enough for the machines I care about.
>
> An example of a system I want to setup and just let run is the mail openvz
container on my server I want to set it up and just let it run.   Debian
stable does a good job here it's fairly secure and I trust it  to run
without my intervention, and only gets updated every couple months.  On that
system I can deal with dependancies pulling x libs etc.
>
> On the other hand the hypervizer of that server runs gentoo, because there
having x libs etc hauled in is far less aceptable because of security etc.
THis makes gentoo's use flags which alow me to control dependancies are very
useful.
>
> So I'm curious what people like about arch especially over gentoo?
>
> Trev
>    

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