gordonmarkus wrote:Hi everyone,
Thanks very much for you comments - they are really informative. I must admit that I have had some problems with the rpm packages, but I thought that was down to my incompetance rather than a problem with the system! I had particular problems when I tried to install apache/php/mysql for my web forum - getting packages that worked with each other was a real nightmare, as I only found out that there were incompatibilities between versions once 1 or 2 of the others were installed! Also now that everything is working, but not on the latest versions - my desktop continually has the flashing exclamation advising that my system needs updating, however I am concerned that if I update everything then new incompatibilities will be found and my server will cease to function.
On the subject of changing distros - is this a fairly easy process? Or is it a case of backing everything up and then a complete re-install. I seem to remember my RH9 install took several hours, and that's not something that I really what to have to go through too often!
Thanks again for your comments,
-Gordon.
Unless you're running a Debian based distro, and even sometime if you do, it's back up and reinstall. If you wanna set up a web server very eaisily I would seriously recommend SUSE, they have a nice GUI for handling Apache, it took me litterally two minutes to have it running with PHP Perl.
Red Hat 9 was ages ago man, two years is like eternity in the world of free and open source software because things just evolve so quickly.
I say go with a friendly distro that has some good quality GUI configuration tools if you're not too comfortable with the commandline configuration, sometimes Apache can be a real pain in the ass on this one.
Patrick wrote:Tsuroerusu wrote:but nothing made me laugh my ass off as much as the story Dann told in the OGG special in episode #93, I first stopped laughing about 3 hours after the episode ended, it was hilarious.
Dan's infamous jogging with the dog story. I think I soiled my shorts listening to that one as well!
It sure sounded like that
When Dann was saying "And I'm trying to aim into the bag" it sounded like you got choked because of the laughing
Snarkout wrote:FWIW, I hat the new "Preference Panel" that the kubuntu guys decided to use as well. However, by changing the command for the System Settings menu option to "kcontrol" you can get the regular KDE control center back.
I agree, however, that the kubuntu guys make a bunch of tweaks to the system I don't want or need. I don't really like the "Simplified Browser" view they ship as default for Konqueror -- The main compalint I have is that the "Window" aind "Go" menus are missing, and with the minimal amount of looking I've done, there seems to be no easy way to get them back. Still, katapult and konqueror based "locate" commands make up for that. There's also the fact that a number of packages for kubuntu seem to suffer from problems I don't notice on other distros. Still, it's what I'm running right now.
I've personally been having a very difficult time settling on a distro recently, much like many people I know. I'm going to have to blame the 6 month cycle that seems to be the craze right now - I really think it's the completely wrong way to do things. I also blame the bizarre dichotomy that is (k)ubuntu - they seem to want to be a cutting edge distro, so they package the absolute latest and greatest at the time of release. They then completely freeze stuff for the next 6 months, even packages that have known major bugs (mplayer or kaffeine anyone?). They also seem to want to appeal to the lowest common denominator in terms of both knowledge and hardware, so instead of using splashy or something, they use usplash, and they *don't* turn DMA on on *most* optical drives for some unexplainably bizarre reason, but have enabled many popup info balloons that drive some seasoned users nuts. You can't have the fastest and cheapest car, as a friend of mine says. If they want to capture the 3rd world country market, they should go that direction. If they want to capture the bleeding edge market, they should go that direction. The fact that they're trying to capture both is just plain weird. The fact that they constantly seem to be branching is bizarre as well. I don't know about any of you folks, but there is simply no way I'd run ubuntu as a server anywhere except in my own home -- even then, their sh!tty release cycle would make it very unattractive. Honestly, I can't think of a single reason I'd run ubuntu rather than debian in a server situation. All this being said, I have kubuntu installed on both my lappy as well as my main workstation, and for the most part like the distro. I wish it weren't the bastard stepchild of ubuntu, but it is, and there's not much that can be done about that.
What I just can't understand is all the hype about Ubuntu!
They say it's an easy distro to use and it's good for first time users, I'm here to tell you that IT IS NOT!!!
If you're a user just coming from Windows, I don't think you'll be too happy with Ubuntu, I think it seriously lags when it comes to configuration tools, and yes I know there is ubuntuguide.org or whatever, but my mum wouldn't be able to figure all that stuff out!!!
I just don't understand how you can say a young distro like Ubuntu is eaisier o use than SUSE (1.0 was released in March of 1994) and Mandriva (1.0 was released in July of 1998) that has had over twice the time to evolve, and in case of SUSE, OVER TEN YEARS!!!
Some people say that things are well intergrated in Ubuntu and I can agree more to that, but when I throw an empty CD-R into my SUSE box it asks me if I wanna start k3b, or if I pop in an audio CD, it asks me if I wanna start KDE's CD player, I can't rememer it's named off the top of my head right now, and etc....
I know SUSE uses RPM, but they havn't had as much forking of their distro as Red Hat has, which is part is caused by the fact that YaST was proprietary, and couldn't be redistributed before Novell bought SUSE, I really don't run into dependency issues that often, the few 3rd party places I use that provides things like MPlayer do a great job of not conflicting with each other.
Anyway, enough with my SUSE talk for now
Just as a final note, the thing that really pissed me off about Kubuntu was that they wouldn't allow me to get to KDE's default desktop settings, all the time it wanted to use it's "simplified settings" and compared to what I'm used to, it was DAMN hard to use.
One thing I did like though, just so it's not all negative, was the new Adept package manager, huge improvement over the crabby Kynaptic they used in the Hoary release.
