yum

Lennart Sorensen lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org
Fri Nov 2 19:12:51 UTC 2007


On Fri, Nov 02, 2007 at 10:14:11AM -0400, Chris Aitken wrote:
> I guess I'm stuck with the nano now. I can't take it back and say, "I 
> can't get it to work in fedora 7." It clearly states on the package it's 
> for Mac and the latest MS OSs.
 
Someone will sooner or later get it working.

> Yeah, that's a tough one for me. I never did get Starcraft playing in 
> full screen in vmware (or downloading the updates to play online in 
> wine). I haven't been able to get the scanner function of my hp psc 1610 
> working. The iPod troubleshoot is in the works. Other than that, by the 
> grace of you guys, I have been able to get everything else working.

To scan with a psc 1610 you need to install hplip which should provide
the required backend for sane to be able to scan from it.  It needs
hplip version 0.9.5 or higher.

> Well, amarok is installed now - I hope I'm on my way.

Hopefully it supports that version of ipod (and firmware revision).

> Okay. I've been thinking of installing an OS from the debian side of 
> things on my daughter's computer. She's the one that is going to have 
> the iPod. That way I could try a debian distro on a non-production 
> computer and see if I am smitten (as Lennart and many others are). I 
> don't want to give up fedora lightly - it's on my wife's computer and my 
> computer - they are production machines for our business.

Well Debian is certainly the largest distribution (in terms of how many
things are packaged in it already).  The last redhat machine I ran was
the firewall at my last job which was replaced by debian when bind
crashed to the 20th time in 7 days.  I guess I should have stuck to
rh5.2 and avoided the 6.0 (never run a .0 release from redhat seems to
be a good rule.  People used to say a redhat .0 was an alpha, a .1 was a
beta, and a .2 was the final working version, and 7.x was just bad).

> The price being a configuration nightmare and bugs?

Apparently.  Debian has the www.debian-multimedia.org site which
provides such things, but the maintainer is very good and the packages
just work.  It all comes down to the quality of the work of the person
that makes the package.

> Funny - I have considered both of those. Are either/both from the debian 
> side of things. I'm still not clear on the difference - is what I call 
> 'rh/fedora type distros' really called sysV OSs? And what do you call 
> debian-type OSs?

SysV is a version of unix.  It has a certain way of doing things.
Almost all linux distributions today are SysV style in their setup
(which mainly refers to how they manage run levels, with runlevel 0
being halt, 6 being reboot, 1 being single user, and 2 through 5 being
admin defined).  The only distribution I specifically know off that does
NOT use SysV style init and such is slackware (unless they finally
started doing something sensible while I wasn't looking).  Slackware has
always been using BSD style init (which is very different from SysV
style.  It is much closer to DOS style config.sys and autoexec.bat style
of linear scripts controling the startup, although even BSD isn't
anywhere near as bad and inflexible as DOS, but it sure tries.)

Redhat/fedora distributions are those based on redhat's releases and
ways of doing things.  Mandrake (now mandriva) started off as a fork
of redhat and still shares a lot of the configuration layout and the
packaging system with redhat.

Debian started off from scratch designing a packaging system, design
policies, social policies, etc and after a few years they had the
beginnings of a distribution.  There is no commercial organization
involved, although many companies certainly have an interest in Debian
and making sure it continues, but they have no more influence over it's
direction than any other participant in the distribution.  A major part
of the appeal of Debian is that since there is no commercial interest
behind it there is no one to say it should be discontinued.  As long as
the developers want to work on it it will continue.  This has also
resulted in attracting a very large number of very dedicated and very
skilled developers, something I really doubht fedora will ever be able
to match, largely due to the fact redhat is still involved with it.

Debian based distributions are those that start off with debian as their
base and then pick and choose which components to include.  Often they
make their own installer.  Some are more tied with debian than others.
Ubuntu is probably the most closely tied since a lot of the developers
in Ubuntu are also developers in Debian, and updates to packages in one
will move to the other and vice versa.  Others are usually less directly
tied, such as linspire, knoppix and so on.  All of the debian based
distributions are much smaller (in terms of package counts) than the
official debian is.  They also target a lot less architectures than
debian does.  By being more focused the debian based distributions have
a much easier time making frequent updates and releases since they have
less area to cover in testing to make sure it all works.  To me of
course Debian makes more sense than Ubuntu because I actually run a
number of the architectures that debian supports which none of the other
distributions do (such as mipsel, arm, alpha, and m68k).  Being able to
have everything based on the same distribution is just convinient, and I
like the fact that I am using a community developed distribution that I
can help develop and fix rather than having to rely on what someone else
decides is important.  I have in the past sent patches to redhat to fix
bugs in their packages, and they really didn't seem to care.  It didn't
even help that I even personally knew someone that worked at redhat,
since even they couldn't seem to get the appropriate developer to give
a damn about the bug (and patch).

> >Example: Lennart, a good diagnostician, is guessing that the problem
> >is that Fedora is crap.  If you gave him more relevant information, he
> >wouldn't make what I assume is a wild and inaccurate guess.
> >  
> I see.

No many many many stories from people using fedora and historical
experience with redhat releases (I used 2.0 through 6.0 ever single
release they made) is what is making me think fedora is crap.  Upgrades
from one version to another seems to frequently break systems for
people, while I have upgraded from debian 2.1 through 4.0 with almost no
problems (and any problems were very easily fixed, and of course I filed
bug reports for those few cases to make sure the next revision of that
release would upgrade cleanly).

--
Len Sorensen
--
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