[Wolves] Any views on Symphony OS and mezzo.

[Adam Sweet]

--- Bobby Singh <bs_wm at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> After a longtime i am going through a sudden newbie
> distro searching.  (Partly due to sudden sound loss
> and x-server problems (think due to a buggy nvidia
> driver and sound conflicting with kdm and gdm).)

KDM and GDM are login managers, this wasn't your
problem. Your problem seemed to be, whether the root
of the problem was resolved or not, that you were
running the KDE and Gnome sound managers (esd and
aRTS) concurrently. For this reason sound would have
got confused with 2 applications trying to seize
control of it.

> So i am up trying out new stuff for the first time
> when i should be elsewhere.  So i'm having problems
> in
> fedora with 'redhat network alert tool' saying
> things
> like 'error can't update due to ... some ...
> mplayer...' etc etc etc. Proberly a newbie problem.

Due to what? Problems with your network connection?
Some kind of conflict in your package cache, archives
or repositries?

> I am thinking about Symphony and mezzo, it is
> apt-get
> based so you on safe ground.

Using apt doesn't make it safer. Any package manager
in careless hands will screw things up. It's just that
apt is considered to be better than any other package
manager for a variety of reasons such as debs handle
dependencies better that rpms, apt is tied up in a
bunch of tools such as dselect and dpackage which are
very powerful and it is also tied up with debconf
which is a great configuration tool. RPM based distros
don't have these things but have similar tools, though
less powerful imo. People may wade in here with yays
and nays, I don't care much for the debates these
days.

>  Looks interesting and
> have an erg to try it.  Is it right to assume on my
> part that it will be buggy?

Never tried them so no idea. Remember that pretty much
every Linux distribution uses the same software, just
slightly different versions and slightly different
patches applied. As a general rule of thumb, a smaller
distribution has less eyes looking at bugs than a
bigger one, though this may be a totally eroneous
concept as we all use the software from the same
developers, just with slightly different patches
applied to make things fit in with the distro in
question. Really it's down to the distro developers in
question and their software choices as to whether it's
buggy or not.

> Would all browser plugins work?

Shrug. Works fine on my system, I don't understand why
it (Flash?) doesn't on yours. To be honest I'd rather
live ithout flash anyway, it's a nuisence for 95% of
the time. I use flashblock to strip it out for me but
still allow me to view it when I need to. All I can
say is should do.

> Has anyone here tryed it?  What do they think?
> I am thinking about having a go.

As a Linux user, trying as many distributions as
possible is only going to help your experience.
Eventually you will settle one you like. For me I
started with Mandrake and used it for 2 years without
understanding a thing about it and I couldn't do
anything with it, then I used Red Hat for about 6
months, same scenario, then Knoppix for maybe 6 months
and then Debian for about 18 months to 2 years which
is where I actually began to learn how to use Linux. I
also ran SuSE for about 3 months on my laptop
concurrently. I swapped Debian for Ubuntu in January
this year and haven't looked back.

I think myself, you will find that for the most part,
distributions are much the same software every time,
but with a different feel (Debian/Ubuntu vs Red
Hat/Fedora vs SuSE and Mandriva), different tools
(Debian vs Fedora vs Gentoo) different branding
(Mandriva and SuSE vs say Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian),
different background concepts (Debian vs Ubuntu vs
Gentoo). At the end of the day, they are all using the
same software. Again this is a personal opinion,
people may disagree.

Look around, try whatever takes your fancy but I think
you will come back to either Ubuntu or Fedora Core. I
don't feel comfortable with SUSE or Mandriva as long
term choices. You may go crazy like Ron at some point
and run Gentoo ;)

> PS:  I can say that every distro should have a quick
> guide like http://ubuntuguide.org/ which covers
> everything in a no-nonsence way.  Other distros like
> fedora have a few pretend ones but not the same.
> Kubuntu has a good one aswell.  The ubuntu guide can
> even be used for other distros.  It should be in GNU
> licence to have a such a thing.  Its THE best linux
> guide/page/information i have ever come across.

The GPL is not a Linux thing, it's the GNU Project
software license. The GPL license merely covers the
term of software usage, you may want to read:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPL
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU

to understand what this is all about. In short the GNU
project was started by Richard Stallman in the early
80s in an attempt to write a complete free software
(free software means essentially more free that just
being open source, open source is just a nicer phrase)
Unix OS from scratch. Most of the command line
utilities these days are GNU tools, which is why free
software people advocate the name GNU/Linux and Linux
people can't be arsed. The story is of course much
longer than that, but this user guide thing ain't
gonna be in a software license.

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