[SC.LUG] .deb vs rpm & Novell controversy

[Richard Smedley]

On Tuesday 21 November 2006 13:22, Robert Marshall wrote:
> I remembered recently that I have a Ubuntu already installed on this
> machine and at the weekend I tweaked lilo to add it as a boot option just
> need to work out how to have a window manager (ok yes I know!) other than
> gnome/metacity. Also seen reports on problems with ubuntu and LaTex which
> are causing other hesitations

Okay, bypass Ubuntu, and go straight for Debian Unstable (or Testing),
and you'll have no more problems, ever, honest ;-D

At least the TeX packages seem quite good, and more than thirty window
managers are easily installable, with none of this nearly-undefeatable default
settings nonsense that Ubuntu does because it Knows Best ;).

> My son has recently installed SLED on his W**** m/c with me providing some
> of the problem solving but it's all experience...

SLED looked v good at cursory examination, but the machine I tried it on died,
and then all the current nonsense blew up.

The question remains - are Novell dishonest, and working against
the spirit (and quite possibly letter) of the GPL (v2)

-or-

Are all the Novell people being honest, in which case Novell have foolishly
allowed MS to use them as a pawn to divide the FS community, in return
for some short-term gain.

It's difficult to see Novell coming out of this well, despite all they have
put into the community elsewhere - and SuSE now has as few pre-takeover
staff as Mandrake does :-(

 - Richard

``Emacs is my OS, Unix is my kernel ;-) ''

-- 
Richard Smedley,                                    richard at sc.lug.org.uk
Sustainable IT Consultant
http://m6-it.org/           ``Software Freedom for the Voluntary Sector''