Just upgraded from RH7.3 to RH9.0 and I am not a particularly happy bunny. OK it has some nice eye candy and up to date KDE, Open Office, gtk+ and Mozilla. However kpackage and gnorpm have not only gone but have been deleted despite doing an upgrade rather than an install. The RH rpm installer is a joke. I have no idea where an rpm's files go so its very hard to make a desktop link or find the docs. I have downloaded both binary rpms and source tarballs for both progs but they have a whole bunch of dependency problems. It seems as though RH is deliberately trying to obstruct users from managing their own rpms. Fortunately I have been able to download and install apt and synaptic so all is not lost but I had to use the command line rpm to do it.
AND I just discovered the kde menu editor is gone too!!
I have debian 3 on DVD and if it were not for the significant backup task associated with a clean install I would be installing it now.
Ian
Ian Bell wrote:
Just upgraded from RH7.3 to RH9.0 and I am not a particularly happy bunny. OK it has some nice eye candy and up to date KDE, Open Office, gtk+ and Mozilla. However kpackage and gnorpm have not only gone but have been deleted despite doing an upgrade rather than an install. The RH rpm installer is a joke. I have no idea where an rpm's files go so its very hard to make a desktop link or find the docs. I have downloaded both binary rpms and source tarballs for both progs but they have a whole bunch of dependency problems. It seems as though RH is deliberately trying to obstruct users from managing their own rpms. Fortunately I have been able to download and install apt and synaptic so all is not lost but I had to use the command line rpm to do it.
AND I just discovered the kde menu editor is gone too!!
All of the above and a whole lot more is why I've left the fluffy world of SuSE behind and gone over to Gentoo. It's also why I installed RH once a few years ago, and never went near it again. IMO all the major distros are fast making many of the same mistakes that MS made with windows. Luckily, they have something decent underneath it all, but even so, IT professionals are finding that the major distros are making their jobs harder and harder by chasing the numpty market the way they are.
Using Debian or Gentoo may mena it takes longer to build the "Corporate Desktop" or server platform, but once it's done, consistent roll-outs are a piece of cake, and subsequent management much easier.
Cheers, Laurie.
Laurie Brown wrote:
All of the above and a whole lot more is why I've left the fluffy world of SuSE behind and gone over to Gentoo. It's also why I installed RH once a few years ago, and never went near it again. IMO all the major distros are fast making many of the same mistakes that MS made with windows. Luckily, they have something decent underneath it all, but even so, IT professionals are finding that the major distros are making their jobs harder and harder by chasing the numpty market the way they are.
In my industry we have little choice over what distros we can use, simply because when you purchase expensive things like Maya or Pixar's Renderman, you're tied to what they support and both these products will only support Red Hat 7.2 and 7.3 at the time of writing. People have tried Debian with RenderMan only to have been told that it's not supported in any way shape or form. Of course, it's not just the industry that I work in that has this problem. I'm sure that most commercial Linux software imposes limits on what distros are supported. Red Hat is going to be the closest you're going to get as a "corporate desktop" and consequently the big boys will only support it.
As for RedHat 8 and 9, own opinions on it is that 8 was full of bugs and I couldn't work with it and 9 is an improvement but perhaps a little too late. It works, but it's still very resource hungry. I also don't like some of the default installation choices - why will they not include 'lynx' as an essential install? Why must everything be graphical?
Using Debian or Gentoo may mena it takes longer to build the "Corporate Desktop" or server platform, but once it's done, consistent roll-outs are a piece of cake, and subsequent management much easier.
Absolutely in agreement here :)
Regards,
Martyn
Martyn Drake martyn@drake.org.uk wrote:
you're tied to what they support and both these products will only = support Red Hat 7.2 and 7.3 at the time of writing. People have tried Debian =
No LSB support yet? That's what their customers need to ask for.
problem. I'm sure that most commercial Linux software imposes limits on what distros are supported. Red Hat is going to be the closest you're =
Really? I thought only proprietary software normally came with such odious limits to their support?
MJR
MJ Ray wrote:
Martyn Drake martyn@drake.org.uk wrote:
you're tied to what they support and both these products will only = support Red Hat 7.2 and 7.3 at the time of writing. People have tried Debian =
No LSB support yet? That's what their customers need to ask for.
Nope. And yes, I agree. With regards to RenderMan, Pixar have stated that they support versions supported (!) by Alias|Wavefront for the most part as they have build constraints placed on them by Maya (as RenderMan support for Maya is available as a plug-in). They said that given that requirement, it is logical for them to build all the other applications on these same platforms. It also means that we're stuck with Red Hat 7.2 as we build our own Maya plugins as well.
problem. I'm sure that most commercial Linux software imposes limits on what distros are supported. Red Hat is going to be the closest you're =
Really? I thought only proprietary software normally came with such odious limits to their support?
Sorry - proprietary/commercial - bleugh. What I think I was trying to say proprietary commercial software tends to post these limits.
Regards,
Martyn
On Mon, Apr 21, 2003 at 10:23:02PM +0100, Ian Bell wrote:
I have debian 3 on DVD and if it were not for the significant backup task associated with a clean install I would be installing it now.
You'd thank yourself later. Say, when RH 10 comes out ;)
If you have broadband, I find net storage very convenient for holding essentials during an upgrade. And if you're like me, you might be surprised how little data a few thousand hours of typing accumulates to. My .zshrc and .vim{,rc} are the only files that have anything of lasting value in them.
Cheers, Alexis
On Tuesday 22 Apr 2003 9:40 am, Alexis Lee wrote:
On Mon, Apr 21, 2003 at 10:23:02PM +0100, Ian Bell wrote:
I have debian 3 on DVD and if it were not for the significant backup task associated with a clean install I would be installing it now.
You'd thank yourself later. Say, when RH 10 comes out ;)
If you have broadband, I find net storage very convenient for holding essentials during an upgrade.
I live on the North norfolk coast so it will be some time before broadband gets here.
And if you're like me, you might be
surprised how little data a few thousand hours of typing accumulates to.
You are absolutely right. All I normaly back up are docs, code and email. However I have quite a lot of data sheets in pdf fornat that take up lots of space and a whole bunch of original mp3 files. I think I'll pop the pdf/mp3 on CD and the rest on zip as normal then install Debian.
Now, should I install stable, testing or unstable?
Ian
On Tue, 22 Apr 2003, Ian Bell wrote:
Now, should I install stable, testing or unstable?
Stable.
If you then find you need more recent packages, by all means upgrade - but you'll find things go smoother if you start from stable. 3.0r1 is the latest.
(If you do upgrade, apt-get dist-upgrade is your friend.)
Andrew.
On Tuesday 22 Apr 2003 8:29 pm, Andrew Savory wrote:
On Tue, 22 Apr 2003, Ian Bell wrote:
Now, should I install stable, testing or unstable?
Stable.
If you then find you need more recent packages, by all means upgrade - but you'll find things go smoother if you start from stable. 3.0r1 is the latest.
Reading the docs on the debian site it seems stable is extremely conservative. Tesing seems relatively danger free too. Trouble is, things I want to use, like gtk+2.2 are only in unstable.
Is it common to use unstable or is it only for the very brave.?
Ian
On Tue, 22 Apr 2003, Ian Bell wrote:
Is it common to use unstable or is it only for the very brave.?
Use of unstable is pretty common - I use it on my desktop at the moment (stable on my servers). But if you're not used to Debian, it's worth working with stable for a while until you get the hang of package management and the "debian way".
Andrew.
Or if it's the installation/hardware configuration that scares you, use Knoppix to install Debian.
On Tuesday 22 April 2003 23:23, Andrew Savory wrote:
On Tue, 22 Apr 2003, Ian Bell wrote:
Is it common to use unstable or is it only for the very brave.?
Use of unstable is pretty common - I use it on my desktop at the moment (stable on my servers). But if you're not used to Debian, it's worth working with stable for a while until you get the hang of package management and the "debian way".
Andrew.
On Wed, Apr 23, 2003 at 12:23:42AM +0100, Andrew Savory wrote:
On Tue, 22 Apr 2003, Ian Bell wrote:
Is it common to use unstable or is it only for the very brave.?
Use of unstable is pretty common - I use it on my desktop at the moment (stable on my servers). But if you're not used to Debian, it's worth working with stable for a while until you get the hang of package management and the "debian way".
I would also add that unstable works best if you have broadband, so that when stuff breaks you can download updates. While you can do this over 56k, it's rather painful.
I'd suggest stable, right now, not least because it's a brand spanking new stable. It was only released a few months ago, so new testing (sarge) is hardly different at all and (correct me if I'm wrong) unstable (sid) is rather tempestuous right now.
You can do clever stuff so that your 'core' release is stable, but you can still have some packages from other groups. Mail me and I'll send you what I use.
Cheers, Alexis
Alexis Lee lxs@sdf-eu.org wrote:
On Wed, Apr 23, 2003 at 12:23:42AM +0100, Andrew Savory wrote:
On Tue, 22 Apr 2003, Ian Bell wrote:
Is it common to use unstable or is it only for the very brave.?
Use of unstable is pretty common - I use it on my desktop at the moment (stable on my servers). But if you're not used to Debian, it's worth working with stable for a while until you get the hang of package management and the "debian way".
I would also add that unstable works best if you have broadband, so that when stuff breaks you can download updates. While you can do this over 56k, it's rather painful.
*mutter* now try it on a 33.6k modem - and people wonder why I don't often apt-get autoclean (if things go back, I roll back rather than forwards generally, untill I've got a spare day to get it out the way properly ;)
I'd suggest stable, right now, not least because it's a brand spanking new stable. It was only released a few months ago, so new testing (sarge) is hardly different at all and (correct me if I'm wrong) unstable (sid) is rather tempestuous right now.
stable is still massively out of date, but usable, testing has a few things stable doesn't, don't forget that just because stable was only released a few months ago that before that it had package freeze for a few months. A few months in this world can mean a *LOT*.
You can do clever stuff so that your 'core' release is stable, but you can still have some packages from other groups. Mail me and I'll send you what I use.
most people do that with a testing/unstable mix rather than stable/testing, afaik (could be wrong, but I'd have thought that was the better way, and I certainly wouldn't mix stable and testing on our servers, though I do every now and again have to backport some things from unstable and keep my eyes open so that I can roll new packages when there's a security alert :)
Just my 2ps worth, obviously.
Brett.
On 2003.04.24 23:19, Brett Parker wrote:
Alexis Lee lxs@sdf-eu.org wrote:
You can do clever stuff so that your 'core' release is stable, but you can still have some packages from other groups. Mail me and I'll send you what I use.
most people do that with a testing/unstable mix rather than stable/testing, afaik (could be wrong, but I'd have thought that was the better way, and I certainly wouldn't mix stable and testing on our servers, though I do every now and again have to backport some things from unstable and keep my eyes open so that I can roll new packages when there's a security alert :)
When mixing testing and unstable are you able to make use of the package tools like apt-get, aptitude etc. to sort out dependancies. How do you configure two package sources without everything getting upgraded to the source with the newest version, i.e. unstable?
Steve.
Steve Fosdick lists@pelvoux.nildram.co.uk wrote:
How do you configure two package sources without everything getting upgraded to the source with the newest version, i.e. unstable?
This is where package pinning comes in. For example, my file says:
Package: * Pin: release a=testing Pin-Priority: 989
Package: * Pin: release a=unstable Pin-Priority: 99
Which basically says to take from testing most of the time, but if something came from unstable, don't downgrade it unless we must. At least, I think that's what it says, but it's been a while since I read the apt_preferences man page.
You then select to use unstable and how unstable to be with the use of command-line switches, as mentioned before.
On Thu, Apr 24, 2003 at 11:19:05PM +0100, Brett Parker wrote:
stable is still massively out of date
Well, not three years anymore. Compared to that, a few months is piffling.
Come to that, shouldn't we be having another release? I thought they wanted releases every year or so? Pixar will have to get busy...
Cheers, Alexis
On Wednesday 23 Apr 2003 12:23 am, Andrew Savory wrote:
On Tue, 22 Apr 2003, Ian Bell wrote:
Is it common to use unstable or is it only for the very brave.?
Use of unstable is pretty common - I use it on my desktop at the moment (stable on my servers). But if you're not used to Debian, it's worth working with stable for a while until you get the hang of package management and the "debian way".
Andrew.
If I start with stable is it relatively straightforward to go to testing and unstable? I have the Debian DVD from last years Linux thingy in London so presumably this has them all on it? I don't have broadband so large downloads are out of the question.
Ian
Ian Bell ian@redtommo.com wrote:
If I start with stable is it relatively straightforward to go to testing and unstable? I have the Debian DVD from last years Linux thingy in London so presumably this has them all on it? I don't have broadband so large downloads are out of the question.
Hrm, that'll probably only be one of stable/testing/unstable, not all of them. Probably your best bet is to yell loudly and get someone to write you a stable and testing CD set, unstable although fantastically up to date (usually) can catch out the unwary. I'd suggest that if its a non-critical system to use testing, and keep it up to date. If its server style, always use stable, its, erm, robust as hell :)
Just my 2ps worth,
Brett
This is perhaps a bit OT but I thought it might raise a smile. Whilst looking through the local Virgin Megastore today, I found 2 copies of redhat 6.2 for sale(!). I think they are trying to charge about 60 quid for them too.
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Alexis Lee -
Andrew Savory -
BenE -
Brett Parker -
Ian Bell -
Ian Bell -
Laurie Brown -
Martyn Drake -
MJ Ray -
Steve Fosdick -
Wayne Stallwood