[Lancaster] Re: the kitchen network.

[Martyn Welch]

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On Monday 07 Jun 2004 18:26, Ken Hough wrote:

> Martyn Welch wrote:
> > I have managed to get a debian/testing (sarge?) box up and running at uni
> > and it seems stable, it uses the 2.4.26 kernel. I guess it would be best
> > to stay with the 2.4.x tree for a little longer for servers.
>
> I would hope that it does appear stable in the short term.
>
> Why stay with 2.4.x? Version 2.6.x is pretty well tried now and is
> widely reported to be OK. It is said to have some benefits over 2.4.x in
> terms of speed, hardware support, etc. If you are concerned about
> stability/etc, why go for a distro that's a major update that's not yet
> proved in the field?
>
> Ken
>

I'd probably lean more towards the majority of the software being from the 
stable tree for the server, I needed quite a bit of the software in the 
testing tree for the box I have at uni so I installed that instead.

Sarge isn't really that big a jump, Debian seems more of a rolling 
distribution in which things are only incorporated into the testing tree once 
quite strict criteria are reached and only make it into the stable branch 
once extremely stable.

> > I'm against both Mandrake and SUSE for this box, too graphically
> > orientated. This is a web server, it doesn't need X, in fact it would be
> > far better if it didn't. Most of the Mandrake and SUSE tools require X
> > and probably the GTK
>
> NOT TRUE! With SuSE, you can choose to do a non graphical install and
> select to install without X. YAST works well on a text only terminal
> (via ncurses).
>
> Ken
>

I'll quite happily bow down to superior knowledge when it comes to YAST.

> > libraries as well, most of the useful tools will be useless from the
> > command line hence I would favour Debian or Fedora. However I have read
> > many reviews of Fedora core 2 which have been less than positive.
>
> As I've mantioned previously, you can hack SuSE from the command line if
> you so choose. I do, but for anything non-trivial I use YAST.
>
> Ken
>

How well does YAST deal with scripts that have been hand altered? Generally I 
find wizard-like tools bad at handling this, but YAST many be the case that 
proves the rule.

> > If nothing critical comes up I can try and take Wed afternoon off if
> > anyone is interested in doing some stuff then?
>
> Would like to help, but am busy this week. Good luck.
>
> Ken Hough

- -- 
Martyn Welch (welchm at comp.lancs.ac.uk)

PGP Key : http://ubicomp.lancs.ac.uk/~martyn/pgpkey.html
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