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Linux Software

The Complete guide to Linux Distributions 45

Posted by CmdrTaco from the stuff-to-read dept.
theGEEK writes "Techweb has "Your Complete Guide to Linux Distributions" - it's a fairly large article aimed at corporate types for integrating Linux into the company. " Covers all the biggies and some of the minors more geared towards the suits.
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The Complete guide to Linux Distributions More

The Complete guide to Linux Distributions

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  • Note the word secure.

    Now think SSL.

    Now think RSA license and export control.

    Now think "not free stuff, here".
  • That's funny...I've got plenty of power over the RH system I've telnetted into (it's currently set up as a DNS server). ANY distro gives you the power...you just have to choose to use it.

  • People always say this, but I haven't heard too many cases of the suing being done. Companies just want somebody to blame when things don't work. And somebody to pay extra money to when they need a new feature rather then doing it themselves.

    I like to call this the bitch factor. Basically they want the other companies to bitch at when things don't work rather then being able to fix it themselves. It easier to say to their customers "sorry we can't do that because our 3rd party vendor doesn't support it." Which is a cop-out(sp?). Customers don't care they just want something that works.

    Later,
    Xamot

  • It probably wouldn't have mattered, about all the information they gave about Debian is 'here's Debian, it's maintained by volunteers, it has a package manager'. That holds for 2.1 or 2.0. For whatever reason, they didn't want to say anything about Debian if they could avoid it.

    Daniel
  • The title says it all. This artical is incomplete, and out of date. Why bother?

    Obviously, a web publication is better than a book for tracking Linux... But why did they write it like this? Couldn't they have set some wide standards of comparison? They comment that SuSE has feature A, and Red Hat has feature B, but they don't mention that Debian has A or B, they just say it has feature C.... ?? What the heck? Like it doesn't? In several cases it does, and Red Hat has A, and SuSe has B...

    Not to mention the fact that SuSE is at 6, and Hat will be at 6 by the time anyone who reads this actually sorts through all this double talk and orders it...

    They might as well have just put up a table of what's avaliable and provided links... Oh wait, there is already a page of links at www.linux.org... maybe they should have just reviewed www.linux.org, and not tried to pick such a wide moving target.

  • I'm pretty sure the very first Stampede was just a "value-added" Redhat, so this is probably just another case of the article being out of date with the facts...
  • Slackware, the best distro ( IMO ) got sidestepped and given a 2 sentence overview. How pathetic. It deserves to be given at LEAST a semi-in-depth mention. The reason a lot of people, like myself, enjoy Linux is because of the power it lets you have over the operation system and not the other way around. Slackware embodies this power.... http://www.slackware.com [slackware.com]

  • A few article comments. (Score:3)

    by Rick_T ( 3816 ) on Thursday April 22, 1999 @09:28AM (#1921299) Homepage
    Like others have said, as a whole the article wasn't too bad. It does suffer somewhat from outdated information, hwoever. For example, Caldera no longer sells WABI. They also didn't mention that WABI only supported 16-bit Windows apps in the first place.

    I also was shaking my head a bit at the "reconfigure without reboot" aspect that Debian was touted to have. IMO, that's effectively true with all Linux distributions. I know we don't have to reboot our Redhat-based servers for most configuration changes. I was expecting to see for Debian "potentially better packaging / upgrade system" rather than what I did see here.

    Some have mentioned that there wasn't mention of Linux support for other architectures in the article. Two things: 1) It *was* mentioned that Linux ran on Sparcs, Alphas, etc. etc. 2) The article was focusing on the x86, so comparing Debian/Alpha and Redhat/Alpha would be inappropriate anyhow.

    Even the BSDs got a mention under "Alternatives". That was pretty cool, even though I'm not a BSD user.

    I did like the fact that for once we get an article posted that *isn't* Linux vs NT - rather it focused on "So you want to use Linux."

    A more current rewrite of the article would be nice, though ...
  • Didn't mention Mandrake 5.3 (a big seller) at all and Turbolinux only in passing. Seemed to me to be slightly out of date and discriminatory
  • Because corporations like to buy products from other corporations, so there's somebody to sue for lots of dollars if something goes wrong.

    Good luck trying to sue Microsoft if NT crashes.
    --

  • This article says "Stampede has taken the Red Hat sources and recompiled them for Pentium-only architectures". This is defenetly NOT the case! Stampede has nothing to do with RedHat. Thank God for that!
  • I'm a bit disappointed in the mention Slackware got. I'm a devoted Slackware user, and It's the best distribution (IMO). They could have given it a little more mention other then the passing sentence or two it was given.


    -- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?

  • I noticed just one drastic error. What a hell was BSDI doing on the URL list?

  • The article lacks a few things, but it is fairly decent.

    Why is RH the most popular? Probably because it was first to use rpm, which has also become very popular. Once you learn how to make your own packages, and use rpm ,it can become pretty useful, in testing packages, and such, and it can also be a real b****.

    All the basing of RH also makes me wonder why? Doesn't RH support the GNOME movement? Don't they still support the OS model? Which is why they did not initially use KDE because of its qt liscense? This was a good things cause it freed up the qt liscense some.

    NOW ABOUT THE ARTICLE

    There are more differences in the distributions than the article states. They differ in how they arrange the /etc file system for starters. SuSE does it there way RH does it there way, Slackware does it his way, and Debian and Caldera each have there own way of doing things. This makes the boot process different slightly for each machine. Also they differ in there compiler optimizations, I believe that SuSE uses 586 or 686 compiler optimizations when compiling there code (not 100% sure). This can change the behavior on a 486/386. They have different package tools, (I am beginning to like linuxconf, although it is not as easy to use as SuSE Yast.)

    There are differences in the locations of libraries, packageing utilities (rpm, deb, tgz), and even differences in kernel patches too.

    RH 5.2 has modular sound in 2.0.36 kernel which is used in the 2.2 kernels, sSuSE applies there own patches to the kernel but they also include a 'defacto' kernel.

    Why Redhat for me?

    I chose RH because it was the most popular, BUT ONLY AFTER TRYING THE OTHER DISTRINBUTIONS!

    Most people who make packages make .rpm or tar.gz and include a spec file it seems. The .rpm are almost always called the 'Redhat' package and then they offer the source. I have not seen someone offer just a .deb or a Slacware .tgz package and the source.tar.gz.

    Redhat is the most popular not because it has squeezed other distros out of the market, but because it has been the most inovative, unlike M$ which threatens other companies financally, and buys out its competition. RH cannot buy out its competition. Another distro would pop up in its place, and the source is all over the internet.

    Yes RH has its bugs, and I have found (from personal experience) that when a bug it reported thru bugzilla tracking they work with you to help fix it. You benifit adn they benifit, it is a symbiotic relationship (look it up moron!). SuSE never did that with me. ( btw these are ftp downloaded distros that I have tried, never bought the official anything).

    So next time you are ready to bash one distro over another ask your self why are people using this one and not this other one?

    It seems that alsmost any software will compile on my RH system, where as I had problems with other distros, such as Slackware, and SuSE. Debian was just to complicated to install and do package management with deb for me, so I did not spend to muc time with it. Glint was easier (not perfect but easier).

    As I have said before I tried TL, deb, SUSE, RH, Slackware, and Caldera, and Linuxpro, and found RH to be the one that satisfies my needs. Again it has it weaknesses, but it has many strenghts too.

    THIS is MY HUMBLE OPINION.. you don't have to agree with it, and you certainly cannot change it!

  • Wake up and smell the distro... Mandrake Linux is based on redhat, infact they say it is basically redhat + kde merged in with it. It adds a ew packages to Redhat, bu tit is basically redhat,, you may want ot check out there site....
  • The author failed to mention it's a guide for Linux distro for x86-based computers only. Otherwise Yellow Dog, LinuxPPC, mklinux, etc should be mentioned also. /* rant */ Why did the author say SuSE the only distro with "live" CD? I remember seeing that on Slackware 3.4 (my first Linux CD), which was released long before we have this Linux hype. Also, Slackware deserve to be mentioned for the UMSDOS system and ZipSlack alone.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • The article wasn't too bad in terms of accuracy however I wish it was a bit more up to date and covering SuSE 6.0 instead of 5.3 in the article. It seems a lot more accurate than some of the rubbish other articles that people like ZDnet would print.
    I'm impressed!!
  • I thought the abscence of mentioning Mandrake was a mistake becasue I belive at the moment it's the easiest to install linux distribution out there (I haven't tried Caldera 2.2 yet).

    But I still maintain that this was a fairly good review for the mainstream press who only normally talk about RedHat.
  • Recompiling for the pentium i586 arch certainly does offer performance differences for most applications. However although the differences are noticable other factors are probably more important when considering which distribution to use.

    I haven't tried stampede yet but if it does compile optimisations with a good distribution then I may use it.

    Then again I could just recompile all the sources of my favourite distribution to make it optimised for i686 but that takes time and effort!!
  • Hi,

    I'm currently running several flavors of Unix, mostly *BSD. I want to set up a Linux box. Which distro should I use? I do not use packages, I prefer to download source, compile, and install applications myself, "by hand" if you will.
    Which distro would be best suited for someone like me ?
  • just made a quick search for my favorite distribution as a sanity check, and:

    Distributors such as Stampede, notes Raymond, have taken Red Hat sources and recompiled them for Pentium-only architecture, vs. the default 386 compile.

    i am not an expert, but i don't think stampede has done this at all, afaik every package is compile from origonal source, and not the srpms, but certainly, it is not the basis of the distribution. they write further:

    Although this adds some processing speed, it sacrifices Red Hat support, and because the performance bottleneck is more likely to be in the I/O system, recompiling doesn't add that much real difference.

    which i don't buy either - overall stampede feels damn snappy, although i haven't seen an actual fact-based analysis anywhere.

    i haven't (and now probably won't) read the whole thing, but this is atleast one knock against the article.
  • "Some distributors have gone on to offer additional related products, which may also influence your decision. Red Hat, for example, offers its secure Apache server."

    are they implying that the Apache server belongs to redhat?

    I don't think so!!

    Whatever distribution you get, you just download apache for free
  • Why didn't ESR mention Debian as a distribution that companies can run?

    I don't see a good reason why he hasn't.. any ideas?
  • anyone else notice that they have, at every turn, pushed forward caldera as the god distro? look at the comparison page, they list drdos, dosemu and wabi as solely belonging to Caldera, and that's the only application-based info they give on that page....


    --tony
    {|}--\/\/\--Tony Hagale -- tony@hagale.net
  • Apache's web server is a different product from Redhat's Secure Apache server.
  • This is not the most complete list over Linux distributions, it's just poorly written by someone who rates the most hip distributions as the best.

    Slackware for one is hardly mentioned, and saying it's for beginners in Linux is just plain stupid.

    It must have been written by a journalist without much technical skill....
  • Stampede either a) was never or b) hasn't been a value-added RedHat for at least a year. I've been using it and lately developing for the distro. It has a completely different package system and file system structure. I'd bet they got their facts wrong.
  • Slackware is "low tech"??????
    Been running my website with Slack 3.6 for
    months, works fine. Am I missing something????

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