[Gllug] Recommended distro

[Richard Turner]

On Sun, 2004-12-12 at 17:49 +0000, Nelson Menezes wrote:
>  --- Richard Turner <richard at zygous.co.uk> wrote: 
> > On Sun, 2004-12-12 at 15:59 +0000, Martin A. Brooks
> > wrote:
> > > 1 vote for debian.
> > > 
> > Now I know this is always a volatile subject, but I ask
> > out of
> > curiosity, not in an attempt to incite another flame war:
> 
> Oh god, what have I done?!

:)

> OK, maybe I should have mentioned I'm also a developer and
> like to tinker with settings beyond the regular uses of a
> "home desktop" system. I do think that Mandrake/Red Hat (my
> experience) do offer all that a regular home user might want.

Yeah, me too I suppose: I have my system set-up to run Apache,
PostgreSQL, MySQL and PHP for Web development work, and have Ruby and
mod_ruby installed because I want to learn the language and start using
that instead of PHP where I can.  I have DHCP configured to
automatically update BIND when it issues a lease to my laptop, which
means less trouble running Samba as a domain controller for that laptop.
None of these are regular 'desktop user' things, and since I have only
one desktop and one laptop they're not necessary either, but configuring
them was an education.  I wanted to try PHP 5's new SOAP support (for
work:( ) and therefore found myself compiling Apache and PHP: Red Hat
derived distros don't prevent one from doing this (if you're a PHP user
I recommend steering clear of the bundled SOAP implementation, if you
must use SOAP at all!).

I suppose if I really wanted to do things 'properly' I should have
compiled new RPMs using the source I'd downloaded, then rpm and yum
would know that those apps are installed, but because it's my home
system my head is as good a package manager as the any.

So, even given that I'm not a base-level desktop user, I'm still not
sure what Debian would provide for me that other distros won't.  The one
thing I can think of is that I could install it, spend ages making sure
that services like netfilter, ntp, etc. are configured OK (the kind of
thing that SuSe or FC installers do for you) and then not have to bother
ever again because I could do 'apt-get dist upgrade' instead of having
to reinstall when a new release comes along.  This might be enough for
me, so I may try Debian, but it's not a convincing enough argument for
me to be totally swayed.

Cheers,

Richard.

-- 
"Racing turtles, the grapefruit is winning..."

B53 8184 E61F 3604 FBF3  4CCB EF07 2942 30F2 739E
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