[ltp] Distributions

[Charles E Taylor IV]

On Sat, 07 Dec 2002 01:03:06 +0000
Richard Neill <rn214@hermes.cam.ac.uk> wrote:

> 2)Windows software - you can run most of it using WINE. You can get an 
> rpm from codeweavers.com (for free). It depends how complex it  is - but
>   generally, if it doesn't involve special hardware or graphics 
> acceleration, it will probably work well enough. (Get the codeweavers 
> wine - Mandrake's version isn't actually as good).

Codeweavers wine is better, but you'll need a Windows partition (or a
Windows "directory") to really use most Windows software.  I've had
problems particularly with installers barfing while trying to install
software to run on Linux.

> 3)Copying executables from one distro to another: in principle, this 
> should work but in practice, it usually won't! The binaries are compiled
> with the particular set of libraries in mind, and with a specific 
> version of gcc. That means that weird things can happen. With Mandrake, 
> you should install using urpmi if at all possible. (Urpmi is Mandrake's 
> attempt to make rpm act like Debian's apt-get).

On Red Hat, just install apt for RPM (www.freshrpms.net).

With regards to distribution choice, I had very little problem installing
Redhat 8.0 on my systems - TP 600, TP 770X, haven't done the 380XD yet. 
The only real glitch was broken DVD support on the 770X which - thankfully
- was fixable.  (I don't think it's RH's fault - looks like an XFree86
bug).  I've had some minor issues - mainly with the fact that I like the
bluecurve icons but just don't like so much blue in the desktop.  I had to
make a "purplecurve" theme instead. :)  There's also the fact that I had
to manually compile and add an html viewer to Nautilus.  I used Nautilus
on my RH 7.3 system as a tool to help me develop my chemistry web pages
(used Nautilus as a viewer able to easily launch several editors), but I
was amazed that Nautilus as shipped couldn't view HTML at all!  

>From reading here, it sounds like Mandrake's achilles heel on Thinkpads is
sound support.  To be fair, it's an issue on all distros, but most of the
howtos out there are written with Red Hat in mind.

-- 
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*  Charles Taylor <tomalek@mindspring.com>
*  Chemistry teacher, Linux enthusiast!
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*  College Chemistry website: http://home.mindspring.com/~charletiv/
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