[AktiviX-discuss] Distros and such...

Harry Halpin hhalpin at ibiblio.org
Fri Oct 7 14:28:05 UTC 2005


As for distros, I use Ubuntu right now on my laptop and *highly*
recommend it. It's in general amazing how easily it installs works out
of the box on arcane and new hardware that made installations of other
GNU/Linux distros hellish to say the least. For obvious security and
stabilitiy reasons, I run Debian sarge on a small experimental server I
use for academic experiments. And apt-get is wonderful, especially
compared to the hell that rpm was for me for several years. In the past
I ran Red Hat and Gentoo and found Red Hat to be increasingly out of
touch and Gentoo indeed fast but I got real sick of making emerge files :)

Given this is a listserv for activists, I think we should encourage
playing with distributions, but that we should try to get more people to
use straight Free Software ala Debian that has a minimal corporate
influence. But the very real drawback with Debian is how out of touch
stable is, and Ubuntu does seem to correct many of its problems,
although I do admit the rather shadowy Canonical worries me. I'm
personally hoping Ubuntu and Debian somehow just merge back together.
And obviously distro-specific knowledge should be shared in
distro-specific forums :) but Jon did bring this question up.

However, the "just use synaptic" advise does not work for everything.
Lots of great software - such as the latest version of Tor - does not
have explicit ubuntu distros (while many do have .deb distros), and I've
ran into situations for software - like the XSL-FO application "fop" -
where I've had to install from source.

In straight Debian, I rarely worry about such things since the damn
thing is just so stable. In Ubuntu, it's one drawback is that there is a
difference between "Debian" and "Ubuntu"-approved, and it's still pretty
murky. The "official" advise from Ubuntu is *only* to install from 
ubuntu-approved repositories. Which doesn't cut it for installing *lots*
of things. Then one has to enter the somewhat dangerous world of either
installing non-Ubuntu debian packages or building from source, often
requiring the installation of even more packages or source that is
non-Ubuntu approved Although Ubuntu does fork from Debian every six
months and supposedly feed-back, I have heard stories of Ubuntu breaking
when installing some non-Ubuntu approved package. Which is worrisome,
but it hasn't happened  yet. It's the only real Ubuntu drawback that
I've seriously worried about.



>
>
> Question for everyone on the list: what distros do you use? What
> distros do you recommend to others?
> Leading to: how best can we share distro-specific knowledge?
>
>> Cheers!
>>
>> Dan
>
>
> John
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