[AktiviX-discuss] Distros and such...

[jeff]

Harry Halpin wrote:
> As for distros, I use Ubuntu right now on my laptop and *highly*
> recommend it.

As r7 chimed in, so will I, and point you towards BLAG. I'm quite biased 
in this, as I am the BLAG maintainer.

> It's in general amazing how easily it installs works out
> of the box on arcane and new hardware that made installations of other

I've used ubuntu just a wee bit and it seems pretty nice. I often use 
debian on servers, especially since it is the preferred indymedia distro.

> 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. 

Ya, there was definitely RPM hell for quite awhile. But the hell before 
RPM existed was even worse. ;)  Yum brings RH/Fedora up to par, though i 
still prefer apt-get. Smart looks like it may become the package manager 
of the future ( http://labix.org/smart ).

> 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 :)

Gentoo was fun and I have it on one server, but definitely don't plan on 
deploying it more. Fedora is quite bleeding edge actually (for this 
reason, BLAG lags behind Fedora and waits for others to fix the various 
piles of packages--then we snag 'em ;)

> Given this is a listserv for activists, I think we should encourage
> playing with distributions,

Me too. I've kicked around lots of GNU/Linux distros and the various *BSDs.

> but that we should try to get more people to
> use straight Free Software ala Debian that has a minimal corporate
> influence.

BLAG is 100% Free Software. We're so dang Free Software we're one of 
only two installable GNU/Linux distros recommended by GNU and RMS himself (
http://www.gnu.org/links/links.html#FreeGNULinuxDistributions )

> 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.

FWIW, BLAG has tor, but it definitely lagging behind. It seems like 
there is a new version of tor each time i check my email.

BLAG uses Fedora as a base, then rolls in packages from RPMForge (a 
combo of Dag, FreshRPMS, newrpms, & Dries), along with custom built 
packages. BLAG uses rpm, yum, apt-get, and synaptic so you can pick 
which package manager you prefer.

> 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.

For BLAG, "we" (e.g. the activist community) can start rolling packages 
customized the way we want. For instance, the BLAG version of Firefox 
includes all Indymedias and the infoshop links (which is a huge list) in 
its default bookmarks. We add irc.indymedia.org to xchat. Much more of 
this can be done and is just waiting for us to continue to tweak.

>>Question for everyone on the list: what distros do you use?

BLAG, Debian, & OpenBSD primarily. I also have kicked around mandrake, 
SuSE (one of the latest revisions was actually the best "out-of-the-box" 
on a higher-end server), CentOS, Fedora, gentoo, NetBSD, FreeBSD & others.

> What
>>distros do you recommend to others?

For desktops BLAG.

For quick/dirty servers (especially for newbie admins), BLAG. Also, BLAG 
has things like icecast, MuSE and such on it's single CD so people can 
get up and streaming quickly without having to run around and 
install/compile more applications.

For long-term servers: Debian.

For firewalls: OpenBSD

>>Leading to: how best can we share distro-specific knowledge?

Mmm, dunno. Wiki, I suppose.

Ciao,

-Jeff        http://www.blagblagblag.org/

P.S. ibiblio is mirroring blag now too.