What Linux to use

[Bill Campbell]

On Thu, Sep 23, 2004, Fairlight wrote:
>At Thu, Sep 23, 2004 at 10:26:28AM -0400 or thereabouts, 
>suspect Bill Vermillion was observed uttering:
>> Putting quill to paper and scribbling furiously on Thu, Sep 23 08:43  
>> Tony Freehauf missed achieving immortality when he said: 
...
>And SuSE 9.0 Professional is exactly what I'd recommend.  I would -not-
>recommend 9.1 yet, as it's based on the 2.6 kernel, and the latest is
>2.6.8.1 (that has to be the first time since the 0.99.99 series that I've
>seen an additional sublevel on an official release) direct from Linus.  The
>kernel itself has to go ten more patchlevels before I'll even consider it
>seriously.  Historically, there have been problems all the way through any
>tree up to and including .17.  They don't get really stable until about
>.18.  2.4 had a -horrible- .15 release that wiped whole filesystems.

I tend to agree with that although we do have a couple of SuSE 9.1 systems
running in production as e-mail (postfix, courier-imap, etc.), web servers
with Zope and Plone.  We used SuSE 9.1 because 9.0 didn't have support for
the SATA hardware.  There have been quite a few updates to 9.1 though.

>So while the rest of their dist may be solid, the core kernel base is not
>something I trust yet.  So I say stick with 9.0 Professional.
>
>> Mandrake, 14%, 189 votes
>
>Over my dead body.  :)  Mandrake has made so many mistakes in the past, I
>refuse to even consider them seriously now.  They're also slow on security
>patches, which I won't tolerate.  Many times, they're last out of the gate.

The last time I looked seriously at Mandrake was late 2001, early 2002, and
(a) they were in serious financial difficulty, and (b) it appeared that
Mandrake might have been ``saved'' by the government of France.  There's no
way in hell that I want to run a distribution maintained by the inventors
of bureaucracy and government inefficiency.

...
>> Debian, 9%, 122 votes
>
>Lots of people using debian, but I've talked to several different camps.
>The package management is supposed to be nice, but you can put different
>package managers on anything--look what Bill Campbell is doing, for
>example.  (That's not criticism, that's respect.)  Debian seems to be one
>of those "late to the party" dists on security and being up to date.  It's
>more of a do-it-yourself'er than an 'enterprise' type solution.  Based on
>bug reports I've seen with just a few OSS projects, Debian also seems to be
>a problem child of a platform, with its own unique quirks that no other
>dist seems to have.

I look on Debian, gentoo, and similar distributions as great for hackers,
but not really very good where one has to build systems for commercial
purposes.

I've found though that running under the OpenPKG package management system
has made the OS much less important as the same packages work on many
varieties of Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, HP-UX, etc.

...
>But if you already know SCO and have nobody in your back pocket that knows
>linux well, you may indeed be better served simply upgrading.  Bill has a
>point, much as I dislike having to concede it.  :)

Another advantage of SuSE is that their linux-abi modules do work well with
SCO COFF binaries (not x286 though).

...
>SuSE is pretty damned painless, though.  I have no hesitations in
>recommending 9.0 Professional.

Ditto!

Bill
--
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