[thelist] Which linux distribution?

Garrett Coakley garrett at polytechnic.co.uk
Thu Jul 12 07:26:19 CDT 2001


On Thu, 12 Jul 2001 11:55:19 +0100
"Bimal Shah" <bimal.shah at venus.co.uk> wrote:

Hello,

> From SuSE, RedHat and Mandrake (others?) which one would
> you recommend, I want to spend more time on development
> then recompiling kernals, fixing bugs, messing around with
> configuration etc.


>From personal experience I would recommend Redhat. I work mainly with PHP, Perl, and lots of markup languages. I drop into Gimp                                                                                                                                                   
I'm running 7.1 right now on this machine and previously I've used 7.0 and 6.2. Saying that though, I do have a soft spot for Debian, it's a little more involved in setting up, but the maintenance is a piece of the proverbial with apt (the package system).

I've also heard very good things about Mandrake 8.0.

Tried SuSE 6.4 once... didn't really get on with it. Didn't like the way they configured the run-level system. A personal bugbear probably.

Sorry, this isn't helping is it? *:)

 
> Does it really matter which distribution I go for, can any
> Linux software run on any distribution?


Pretty much so. The main differences usually come down to the packaging system. There are three main types (IIRC):

1: .deb: This is used by Debian, Progeny and the other Debian based distributions. Very neat system. Uses the apt package manager, which is acknowleged by people much smarter than me to be pretty hot. Want to upgrade your version of KDE? Just add the location of the download site in /etc/apt.sources then just type "apt-get kde". It takes care of all the dependencies etc automatically.

2: .rpm: The RPM system used by Redhat, Mandrake, SuSE and, umm... others. Not as feature rich as apt, but version 4 has made up a lot of the difference. Sorts out dependencies automatically.

3: .tar.gz: Plain ol' source tarballs. Used by Slackware. Don't know too much about this. Very rarely compile from source... and I've never used Slackware. Might give it a go soon... ver8 has just come out.

There are tools out there to convert from one package to the other, alien for instances:

[garrett at cincinatti garrett]$ man alien

       alien is a program that converts between Redhat rpm, Debian deb,
       Stampede slp and Slackware tgz file formats. If you want to use a
       package from another linux distribution than the one you have
       installed on your system, you can use alien to convert it to your
       preferred package format and install it.

Also there are loads of third party sites that release packages of software (http://freshrpms.net) that you may not be able to get from the vendor themselves.

You may find dependency problems if you try and install, say a Mandrake RPM on a Redhat system.... but I've never had a need to try this. Between Redhat, FreshRPMS and http://fr2.rpmfind.net I've always found what I needed.

As I said, my recommendation is for Redhat, just from ease of installation and power... but y'know.... it's whatever you feel happy with *:)

HTH

G.

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