[sclug] Distro Copies

[Alex Butcher]

On Mon, 31 Oct 2005, Graham wrote:

> 	I'm looking for a copyable distro, either buy or to copy.

The last source I bought CDs/DVDs from was <http://www.uselinux.co.uk>.

> 	What do people recommend?
>
> 		centos-4.2
> 		debian
> 		...

Being a long-time RH user (2.1/1995) I'm happiest with RH-like distros, and
recommend Fedora Core for 'play' machines where you want the
latest-and-greatest stuff and don't mind doing some work in to fix stuff
yourself and file bugzillas from time to time, RHEL for when you need
"enterprise-grade support" or a platform that's validated for third-party
applications such as Oracle, and CentOS for when you need RHEL-like
stability, but are planning on only running packages supplied with RHEL
and/or building your own and replacing selected packages anyway.

Out of your list of requirements, you probably won't find a single distro
that meets them all to everyone's standards. Check out
<http://tinyurl.com/b5oct> for a post I wrote on this topic a few days ago.

Out of FC/RHEL/CentOS:

> 	I want "the latest", so that new headers are used.

FC

> 	I want mostly stable, so that I can patch and stay with it.

CentOS

> 	I like the idea of LAN installs, maybe LAN boots, or local core pkg copies

All

> 	I like HedRot, because its a broad platform, easy install for others, ...

All, though FC's install will be less tested, by definition.

> 	It's a long time since I hated Debian install - time to forgive?

Dunno.

> 	I've seen the name "Ubuntu", what do you think?

I've heard good things, for desktop users. Thinking of it as a stablized
version of Debian Unstable, with tweaks for desktop use, seems to be the
most appropriate.

> 	I dont have time to download a dozen trial bootable-CD's - serious recommendations?

Knoppix.

> 	I sometimes ignore the distro, and install my own /tools/2006/ from unpatched .tgz's

You can always build from source AND use your chosen distro's native package
database (RPM, dpkg, ebuild, whatever) in order to avoid losing the benefits
of a package/dependency database.

> 	I usually hate the provided firewall, xinetd, ..., but lifes like that.

FC/CentOS/RHEL aim to be secure from network attacks by default these days.
IMHO, that's the only sane policy these days.

> 	I do want the package source, to encourage (me) to take a peek.

src.rpms are available for all FC, CentOS and RHEL packages.

> 	DVD is preferred. I'm not messing with CD shuffling. (Single layer = easy copy)

FC and CentOS are both available as DVD images.

> 	I have a medium Athlon, and a clockwork-celery laptop (800x600) LAN-ONLY!

FC, CentOS and RHEL are both optimized for i686 architectures, but most
packages only use instructions that are in the i386 instruction set, so the
packages will run on i386-, i486- and i586-like CPUs as well. A few selected
packages (kernel, glibc, openssl, nptl-devel) are also supplied as packages
including i686-only instructions where doing so has been proven to have a
significant improvement on performance.

Best Regards,
Alex.
-- 
Alex Butcher      Brainbench MVP for Internet Security: www.brainbench.com
Bristol, UK                      Need reliable and secure network systems?
PGP/GnuPG ID:0x271fd950                         <http://www.assursys.com/>