John wrote:
> On Fri, 10 Dec 2004 01:44:04 -0500, Chad Perrin <perrin@apotheon.com> wrote:
>
>>Just for the record:
>>
>>I find Bryan's continued character assassination and "since he stopped
>>fighting, I can flame Chad in third person without worrying about
>>retaliation" nonsense to be offensive and utterly inappropriate.
>
>
> I too noticed this in posts after you guys buried the hatchet. In my
> posts tonight I have studiously avoided mentioning you by name--that
> piece of specific information isn't relevant.
I appreciate that, regardless of whether you would have used my name in
a positive, negative, or neutral light.
>
> Perhaps it was unintentional on his part. But I think BOTH of you
> should forget about the other person and spend your time on discussing
> "stuff", like what makes a distro. I completely agree, the
> installation process is a big deal to me, and it can make me discard
> one distro and embrace another--just because certain hardware is
> detected, AND the correct software is installed.
Considering that even his signature block is an underhanded (and
inaccurate) dig at me, I rather doubt it's unintentional.
As for the issue of installers: I'm not sure what you were saying about
the Debian installer. Obviously, I could read your words, and I got
your point about how the installer is somewhat critical to the choice of
a distribution when you're installing it yourself, but I'm not sure I
caught the underlying opinion you have about Debian's installer. I'd
appreciate a clarification on that matter, just for my own edification
if nothing else.
As for my own perspective on it:
The Debian installer has undergone a drastic change recently. The
default installer for Debian Woody was a cantankerous, unwieldy beast
that I found tiresome and prohibitively difficult. That was my first
experience with Debian, and I never really got so far as to enjoy the
fruits of the Debian developer community's labors where the apt system
is concerned to any notable degree until I tried the installer that is
introduced with Debian Sarge.
After wrangling with the Woody-era installer for a bit, I had given up
on it and gone to SuSE and MEPIS as more-favored distributions. Then, I
decided to give the Debian Sarge net installer a shot. I haven't looked
back since.
The Sarge-era installer is great. It's easy to use, a slender bit of
good coding, and lends itself to quick installs. It seems to lag
slightly as compared with other distros in hardware detection, I'm
afraid, or at least in properly handling hardware functionality when
it's detected, but not by much. For my own tastes, the ease of a lean
install and the available apt repositories more than make up for the
very minor hardware support in the installer in choosing which distro to
try first. In fact, I'm more willing to work through hardware issues
with Debian than with another distribution, if only because the apt
repositories and easily customized installation constitute a compelling
motivation for getting it right with Debian, for me.
There are certain classes of parts that can be "problem children" for
Linux in general. My experience teaches me that all Linux distributions
handle the "mainstream", good-with-Linux parts pretty much equally well,
and that off-color hardware support varies from distro to distro.
Compared to some other distros, Debian doesn't seem to make as much of
an effort with some of those "problem child" parts. As such, I have a
system (this one, in fact) that has all name-brand, quality parts, and
Debian handled hardware support without a hitch. I have another system
here with pretty much 100% low-rent parts, including onboard video and
sound on a no-name motherboard that uses an SiS-knockoff chipset, and
while I can get "just" Debian running on it without huge problems,
getting X running on the thing seems to be far beyond my skills.
On the other hand, on that problem child system, I've discovered that
the installers for FreeSBIE, FreeBSD, SuSE, MEPIS, SimplyMEPIS, and
Knoppix won't even work. All that I've tried on it that has worked is
Debian and Slackware. That's it. In neither case was I able to get
video working properly. Knoppix will run on it from the CD but, as I
said, it won't install to it. None of the others will even boot all the
way (to the installer or the LiveCD OS, as appropriate for each).
While some distributions are better than Debian at autodetecting (and
configuring) problem-child hardware, I've yet to run across a machine
(other than an 8MB-RAM laptop circa '96 that wouldn't, apparently, let
anything install that isn't as old as the laptop itself, and even not
some OSes that old) that will not accept a Debian installation, if all
you want is pure console work.
-- Chad ----------------------------------------------------------------------- This list is provided as an unmoderated internet service by Networked Knowledge Systems (NKS). Views and opinions expressed in messages posted are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of NKS or any of its employees.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Fri Aug 01 2014 - 17:27:15 EDT