[Glastonbury] Just a little idea

[Andrew M.A. Cater]

On Sat, Nov 06, 2004 at 04:03:35PM +0000, steve wrote:
> 
> >When you've done that one, get Steve to move the school from Mandrake :)
> > 
> >
> > 
> >
> please outline what advantage this would have for the school and i will 
> consider it.
> regards,
> steve
> 
1. There's a Debian-Edu subproject which encompasses Skolelinux.  I
haven't yet seen a SuSE-Edu/RedHat-Edu or Mandrake-Edu.

2. Consistent administration

Debian puts docs and licences in a consistent place which is Linux
Standard Base compliant. The init scripts are all in standard places.
Install a package? apt-get install foo. Reconfigure a package in place?
- if, for example, your mouse driver is wrong and you need to
reconfigure your xfree86 setup providing default answers to questions
you've already been asked.

  dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86
  
3. Open and free licensing.

Do you know your licences? When the licence audit police turn up -
on Mandrake/RedHat/SuSE, I can't guarantee that I've 80 licences for
80 machines for all the software if I've taken one disk and installed
it 80 times. RH/Mandrake/SuSE all include third party code and/or
non-free components of their own distributions.  Debian main - take it
copy it, use it unrestrictedly. That's about 14000 packages - more than
any other single distribution.

4. Text mode installer - 

You can install Debian over ssh or with a non-functioning X Windows System. 
That may not sound like much - but RH/Mandrake default installs predicate 
a running and correctly configured X to start off with.

5. Maintainer support.

</full, frank, free disclosure> I am a Debian maintainer :) </fffd>
I can trace the provenance and maintainership of each of the Debian
packages, no matter how small/insignificant. I can follow a well ordered
bug tracking system. Mailing list support is pretty damn good. Can't say
that with quite so much certainty for Mandrake/SuSE/Red Hat.

6. Choice of versions and easy move between versions.

7. Ease of update - see Martin's post and note that reboots following a
complete upgrade are only necessary if you've changed glibc or kernel
version. I update my systems every night. I reboot them only to put in 
a new/updated kernel version.

Does this help - and that's without particularly going into zealot mode.
:)

Andy
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