yum

Fri Nov 2 20:32:37 UTC 2007

I am top-posting only because this is my only comment. Thanks for your 
thoughtful answer.

Chris

Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> 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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>
>   

--
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