[SLUG] ramblings about distributions (red hat 8)

From: Bob File (rfile@innet.com)
Date: Sun Oct 13 2002 - 13:13:24 EDT


I installed RH 8 on my second box which consisits of a P2 333MHz and 128 M of
ram and a Diamond Fire Pro 100 card (Glint). The drive is a 6 gig and is
probably DMA 33. It is pretty much unusable on this system. It is just way
too slow. I am pretty sure that all interfaces were working properly - I had
an ethernet card in there and the other box was doing DHCP for it and also
forwarding, so that was working. I just couldn't stand it - it was so slow.
I also tried it on my newest box - Athlon 1.2 GHz and 512 M ram and matrox
G450 video card. The hard drive is a little slow, but it is usable on that
machine. I think I could recommend it to first timers. I don't remember any
glitches during installation. The version I have is the downloadable ISO's .
<plug>
I have a slow modem connection so I bought CD.s from Bill Bennet:
http://www.chguy.net/ I would recommend him for slow connection folks.
</plug>
The desktop is "reel slick", but beware - it is quite homogenized between
GNOME and KDE. I am a KDE fan and I am not sure what I think about this.
OTHO, fonts look good even at small point sizes and the display seems quite
nice.
I am used to having a ton of stuff available for installation (SuSE 8), but I
think the package manager is better than the one built into suse. I tried to
install something off of one of the suse disks and it stopped and warned me
about missing dependencies, whereas YAST would have done a -nodeps type of
install with unknown packages.
This really isn't a fair comparison between distributions since one is a free
download and the other is a store bought distribution in a box.
I do feel that RH 8 is definitely a step in the right direction to getting a
usable desktop distribution for folks who "just want things to work" and
don't tinker much.

I see the file directory structure is somewhat different also. I can't
remember if it is LSB compliant or not, but if it is I can see that I am in
for a change if I go to upgrade SuSE, because it is going to be LSB also.
SuSE has a set of scripts that root can get to easily - they all start with
rc; for instance rcapache [parameter], parameter being something like start |
stop | reload and the like. I have grown fond of these scripts and I will
miss them if they aren't included in an LBS distro.



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