[Nottingham] distro chance

[Michael Leuty]

On Sunday 06 Jun 2004 22:58, danny wrote:
> The things i liked about drake were easy download and instilation of
> packages through the urpmi command
> Easy enough to fix when system goes kaboom
> Which other distros offer similar advantages?

I like Fedora (Core 2).

Debian is a major project with lots of little bits that don't always work 
together properly, unless you use woody (stable) which is very out-of-date. 
The advantage of Fedora is that it consists of recent versions of software 
and the entire package has been tested to work together as a whole.

You can't just give the installation CDs to your grandmother and tell her to 
get on with it, but given just a little knowledge of how Linux works there 
is no problem getting things set up.

yum works in a similar way to Debian's apt (and indeed you can install and 
use apt instead of yum if you prefer). "yum update" updates your system to 
the latest version, "yum install packagename" installs the package, 
assuming that it is one of the repositories listed in yum.conf.

Fedora has an enthusiastic user base, and plenty of help is available. Two 
particularly good websites are
www.fedoranews.org
and
www.fedorafaq.org
The latter site provides a version of yum.conf which you can just slot in. 
The main repositories you want are:
Basic Fedora: base, updates-released
Fedora.us extras: fedora-stable
Livna.org: livna-stable
These are designed to work together without hiccoughs. There are other 
repositories you can use if you want a package that is not in the above, 
but you need to watch the dependencies or problems may occur (as in 
Debian).

The livna.org repository includes packages that Red Hat don't put in vanilla 
Fedora because of potential legal problems. These include the ability to 
play MP3s. The sites above tell you all about how to install this extra 
software, as well as Java, Flash and so on. It is so simple to follow that 
I managed to do it all.

And Fedora looks very nice, is beatifully antialiased, and runs smoothly and 
pretty fast (no doubt Gentoo is much faster but I haven't the skill to 
install that). More polish has been applied to Gnome than KDE, but both 
work fine. Personally I use Gnome but run KMail as mail client and KPilot 
for my Palm, and it all works very well together.
-- 
Michael Leuty