[ltp] Recomendations on the "best" distribution for TP

[Dennis Lee]

On Monday 07 May 2001 17:57, you wrote:
> On 7 May 2001, Forrest English wrote:
> > this is basically going to turn into a distro war.   to my knowledge, all
>
> Not necessarily. All that was requested was our recommendations, as long
> as nobody starts taking things personally, or sniping, we should be
> perfectly capable of holding a civilised discussion. For the record, I'd
> suggest debian - the package management/general quality is superb, and
> staying current is trivially easy thanks to apt.

<caution = "rambling">
I was using Red Hat 6.2 on my i1400, the install went great (text mode only 
install; GUI would hang solid) the only thing after the install that I had to 
fix was the Lucent Win-modem; and APM which I have never got right.

I just did a Progeny Debian install last week as the Red Hat 6.2 base I had 
was getting a bit crufty. On this TP i1400 the Progeny Debian (cdrom) install 
did not go well it fell over at several points, had I not been an experienced 
Linux user those cd's would be in the trash now. After a bit of trial and 
error I have a Progeny Debian system up and running and so far I must say it 
was well worth the extra effort.  

The RPM system is good and works well; I was playing with Ximian redcarpet 
witch is kinda nice ........ but "apt-get" from the command line just blows 
away any rpm based tool I have tried.  I am now making plans to convert the 
rest of my machines to Debian based systems.  Having been a long time Happy 
Red Hat user I am not making this decision lightly, from direct experience 
and what I have herd / read Debian systems have some installation issues, so 
for a new user, who is going to do their first Linux machine I would still 
recommend Red Hat. 

What sold me on converting the rest of my machines to a Debian type system; 
this happened today: 
Debian Security Advisory: cron local root exploit.
Was published today. At the same time I saw the note on LinuxToday an email 
arrived from Progeny about the problem. The email contained info and 
instructions on how to fix the exploit. From root command line type "apt-get 
update" then when that's done "apt-get install cron" and we are done. Had 
this been a Red Hat fix, I would have been a week finding a FTP server with 
the right files and or band width to down load the files.

How do some of the other distro's stack up on ease of up dates? It seems most 
are getting better at installation. 

Just my warped openion
Dennis

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