[H-GEN] Computing without GUI

[David Jericho]

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On Mon, Jan 29, 2001 at 11:44:18AM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote:
> (For those playing along at home, David doesn't like missing a chance to
> advocate Red Hat over Debian. *sigh* I remember the good ol' days when
> using Debian was the exception, and *we* were the ones what got to be
> daring and controversial)

Just for the record, I a distribution atheist. I don't run as root,
therefore the underlying structure actually makes very little difference in my
day to day using of a machine.

I run RedHat in a production environment because that's what was used before I
came, and that's what I've been told in the past to user by my managers, and 
therefore it stays that purely for conformance. 

> of apt-get. I've heard rumours Mandrake will be borrowing Conectiva's
> port of apt for their next release too.

I have actually, and I use it on diskpig.org as well. Redhat-contrib shocking
at the best of time, so use it very minimal. It works, and well, but quite a
few packagers should have their root privileges taken away from them.

Given that I have a machine room full of RedHat boxes, and that I have to only
download packages once, a simple scp to the machine I'm going to "rpm
--freshen" does the trick.

> >If you're the set and forget type, short of security updates, something like
> >RedHat is just as good.
> 
> I'm not sure that's entirely accurate: it's certainly pretty easy to
> "forget" a Debian system, and just let it apt-get dist-upgrade from
> security.debian.org every so often.

My point here, is that RedHat is _just as_ good. I didn't say better, nor did I
say Debian was unsuited to being used as a server.

> Pfft. If we chose distributions based on the logo, we'd all be using a
> *BSD exclusively. Don't try to deny it.

*cough*
 
Some have heard the story of how I was once denied the ability to use FreeBSD
because of the daemon logo. Shame it was the better choice for the particular
job at hand.

> above: I've used Red Hat less, and less recently, than David's used Debian,

In my defence against Jason Parkers recent comments, I have until recently had
root on a Debian box, and accounts on many others. I am actively involved in
#linuxaus on OPN, which is a very very Debian centric channel. As such, I
often hear the gripes of Debian users. Being a RedHat user in that channel, I
_always_ hear the upsides.

I don't run Debian at home, but nowdays it seems harder and harder to gain
acceptance as a Linux user when you admit you run RedHat. It seems to be
instant write off.

As of this afternoon, and as both my main desktop need a reinstall, and I'm a
distribution atheist, I'll have OpenBSD, RedHat and Debian installed on three
different machines.

>From the user perspective, Unix-is-Unix-is-Unix.

Of course, I'm sure some will disagree.

-- 
David Jericho, Systems Administrator
WebMatchIT Interactive Marketing

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