[SWLUG] Problems

[Dafydd Harries]

Ar Tue, Nov 11, 2003 at 06:59:06PM +0000, ysgrifennodd Chris M. Jackson:
> On Tue, 11 Nov 2003, Steve Anderson wrote:
> 
> > Way-hey - my first reply after much lurking. Way-hey!
> 
> and a very warm welcome to you.  Take a mug of hot caffeinated fluid and 
> join us by the fire. :)
> 
> >     Not defending it, it's a necessary evil, that's all.
> 
> I feel your pain.  I live in a house full of Windows users.  All the 
> computers in our house run Windows XP, with some exceptions.  The "file 
> server" is on Win2k, and one person has a PC which isn't quite up to XP 
> spec and so runs Win98.  Our self-proclaimed sysadmin seems to be of the 
> opinion that Windows is the way to go, and that Linux is broken 
> (s/kettle/pot).  Assuming that this is true, then does that make the fact 
> that 75%+ of the Internet is powered by Unix-based systems something of 
> an anomaly?  Does it therefore make 75% of sysadmins stupid?  
> Of course, it might suggest that our house has a dumb sysadmin :)

Last year I was in a house with four other computer scientists. (And a
German/Japanese student. Guess who was the only female. She was also the
only one remotely interested in football, though. But I digress.) At the
beginning of the year, I was the only Linux user, and the others were
what you might call bi-curious. By the end of the year, everybody had a
Debian installation. (Even if everybody but me had a Windows
installation as well.)

It probably helped that we had a router with Debian on it sitting
between our ADSL and our switch, because everybody had an account on the
machine and could play around with it. (The Debian router, a Pentium 75 IIRC,
was very stable apart from trouble which I suspect was a dodgy early USB
bus which necessitated rebooting it every few weeks to get the modem
working again.)

> >     b) WineX can play all the new games as well as XP can. So sometime 
> > over the rainbow...
> 
> That's my *only* reason for keeping a Windows boot (and the only thing I 
> ever use it for anymore) - my framerates suffer terribly for multiplayer 
> games.  With reasonably-highish settings, I can muster 150fps on a good 
> day playing UT on Windows.  I daren't try the Linux version of UT - even 
> Tux Racer gives me about 3spf (sic - after killing the usual unnecessary 
> processes).  Oh, well ...
> Start weighing those pies already :)
> 
> > Red Hat 9 (hey, I'm a newbie - one of my cardboard-box mounted computers 
> > is going to be Debian or Gentoo now I'm getting to grips)
> 
> Given the choice of the two, I'd take Debian.  The install process is 
> painful at times, and up-to-date software is occasionally difficult to 
> come by ("How many known bugs are you willing to live with?") though I'm 
> told this is improving).  That said, Debian-based systems have the very 
> handy one-line install and upgrade mechanisms via apt - something which 
> vanilla RPM has yet to achieve.

In general I'd say that the installation and the release cycle are
Debian's greatest weaknesses. Neither is a problem for me because (a) I
have grown to love and cherish the Debian installer and (b) I run Debian
unstable. Both weaknesses are recieving attention: a completely new
Debian installer is under develpment and recently went into beta; and
Debian has been trying to shorten its release cycle for years by various
means. Whether the latest attempt -- based on an aggresive schedule,
encouraging use of the "experimental" distribution and a liberal policy
on non-maintainer uploads -- will succeed or not remains to be seen.

There are projects such as GNOME which have successfully managed the
transition to a time-based (as opposed to feature-based) release
schedule. In GNOME's case, at least, it seems this has worked very well.
Perhaps more free software will move in this direction. On the other
hand, perhaps it will only happen for projects which are very large or
complicated or have a large degree of corporate involvement or some
other property I haven't thought of.

> Undoubtedly I will get flamed for what I am about to say, but here follows 
> my usual diatribe on Gentoo.  If I want to play with source packages, then 
> I will experiment with Linux From Scratch, or similar systems, which 
> typically involve actually sitting down and manually putting the 
> compilation process into action.  There is much to be learnt from 
> going through this process.  Gentoo (in part) "works" by taking a 
> bunch of source packages, and automatically building them all.  Given that 
> it builds such things as X, you'll be waiting for quite some time for 
> everything to build, and you typically learn nothing from the experience 
> (other than the fact that X takes a fscking long time to build 8), and end 
> up with binaries very much like any other system.  If I want my binaries 
> to be very much like any other system, then I'll let other people use 
> their CPU cycles to build the software, and issue binaries that they have 
> kindly provided, rather than waste my own time and effort.  To 
> paraphrase what many people have said over the years: "As nice as it is to 
> have a computer build all this, to be honest I'd rather be using the thing 
> instead."

With regards to Gentoo's speed, it seems there's a paradoxical
relationship between building it and using it: if you've got a very fast
machine, compiling won't take very long, but the optimizations won't
make as much difference to you. If you've got a very slow machine, it'll
take forever to get those highly optimized binaries.

Gentoo's (run-time) speed advantage is dubious in any case. There are
stories (http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2003/44/) of people finding
programs running faster on Debian than on Gentoo.

And if you have some reason to want to compile something yourself,
"apt-get --build source $PACKAGE" is available if you choose Debian.

-- 
Dafydd