[H-GEN] which Redhat?

Wed Apr 9 00:29:56 EDT 2003

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Quoting Ewan Edwards <Edwards_Ewan_B at cat.com>:

> On Wednesday 9 April 2003 09:11 am, Peter Arnold wrote:
> 
> > So what happened to RH 8.1 etc? I was sitting back and waiting for the
> > "mature" version of 8 when they seemed to have moved on to version
> > 9....Sigh...
> 
> I was curious about that too.  I suspect its a marketing thing - you know
> like Netscape went from 4.7 to 6 in response to MS not being able to get IE
> right and having to bring out so many new versions that they had v6 when
> Netscape was still at 4.78.  :-(

Hey, Netscape had a whole heap of bad releases too.  The first actual *usable*
and somewhat *stable* release of Netscape 6.x (In my opinion) was 6.2.  6.0 was
extremely unstable (not suprising for a new codebase), 6.01 had some minor
fixes, but still unstable and clunky, 6.1 was a little better, 6.2, better
again.  7.x is reasonably stable.  Although, I still prefer Mozilla 1.3. ;-) 
Works nicer with Enigmail (OpenPGP plugin).

> >  Is 8.0 mature and stable?
> 
I haven't had too many problems with Red Hat 8.0 myself.  The main problems have
been with some of the configuration utilities that I've found to be quite buggy.
 This is fine, I simply edit the config files by hand, so if you don't mind
getting dirty with a text editor, it's not that difficult, but unfortunately
some of the utilities (well, for me at least) are a little too unstable.

I don't mind RH 8.0, it's got its flaws, but so does any OS (some more than
others).  However, there are some things that really irritate, and some features
from other distros I really like.

So much so, that I'm thinking of building my own distro of Linux.  Basically
combines features from Debian (mainly apt-get), Slackware (the BSD init - very
simple, very efficient), SuSE (the config tools are great) and probably Red Hat
(RPM).

On the last point, I'm undecided as wether to use RPM or DEB as the package
format.  I'm leaning towards RPM because I've used it for years and know it
well.  DEB is new to me.  I've only used Debian Linux for the past few months. 
I only downloaded Debian because it seemed to be the most mature version of
Linux/MIPS out there, since we have two machines running MIPS processors, a
Gateway Micro Server (aka Cobalt Qube 2, little endian IDT R5K chip) and a SGI
Indy (big endian R4600, yeah we decided to take the plunge anyway - and it's
working great apart from vino).

My main motivation was to produce a multimedia-orientated version of Linux
specifically for the Indy (naming the distro Grand Prix Linux), with support for
the vino, and other goodies like V4L tools, video editing, and perhaps XviD
(I've installed it on Debian, but xine doesn't like 8-bit newport graphics).

I've got Linux From Scratch v4.0 and kernel 2.4.20 source code for this task,
but I'll look more closely at it when the uni backs off with the assignments. ;-)

+-------------------------------------------------------------+
| Stuart Longland           stuartl at longlandclan.hopto.org |
| Brisbane Mesh Node: 719             http://stuartl.cjb.net/ |
| I haven't lost my mind - it's backed up on a tape somewhere |
| Griffith Student No:           Course: Bachelor/IT (Nathan) |
+-------------------------------------------------------------+

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