[NTLUG:Discuss] Linux Dist.

[Christopher Browne]

On Sat, 05 Aug 2000 05:18:45 PDT, the world broke into rejoicing as
Shel Johnson <cachemonet at yahoo.com>  said:
> Thanks for the input everyone.. I think I'm gonna try SuSE when version 7
> is released.. from what everyone has told me, it's one of the easiest one
> to install.. Also, a lot of people are saying that after the installation,
> it's all the same under the hood, correct??.. after that, I may have a
> look at one of the NTLUG meetings that are shown on the website.. Again,
> thanks for the advice!!!

"Under the hood," they all "pluck" from the same source code streams:
--> All use the Linux kernel, of whatever version;
--> All use GCC, of whatever version;
--> All use Perl, of whatever version;
--> All use GNU File Utilities (guess what?) ... of whatever version;

The same is true for any number of additional components, whether
you're talking about Netscape, C libraries, text editors, and such.

Different distributions may happen to pick different versions, based
on what was available when they prepared the release.

The result of this is that while there may be temporary differences
of version, _all_ the distributions are converging towards the latest
versions of the software they all get from common places.  

That speaks to "persistent similarity."  If Caldera and Red Hat's latest
versions use different versions of GCC, that's not a persistent worry, as
both will upgrade in the next year through a common development "stream."

On the other hand, there are also some persistent _differences_, largely
relating to:
a) Installation management, and
b) System management.

The floppy you use to initially boot up the install process for Mandrake
was custom-built by them, and the processes designed for checking out
what hardware you have, and partitioning disks, and getting the install
started, are quite custom to Mandrake.  All the distributions have
somewhat analagous, but _independently developed_, software to manage
the installation process.

Mind you, this should _largely_ only affect you at install time, and
if the system is actually _useful_ you probably aren't reinstalling
all the time, so this area of "persistent difference" may not be
crucially important.

"System management" is the other area where there may be persistent
differences.  That is, the "pretty tools" to help you do things like:
- Managing printers
- Controlling network connections
- Managing other services [ftp server, database server, mail server, ...]
- Installing upgraded versions of software

Red Hat has, for this, a tool called Linuxconf.  Caldera had developed
one called COAS, which is being replaced by Webmin.  I've not seriously
run SuSE or Mandrake; I'm fairly sure they have their own system
administration packages.

This may or may not include "package management" tools; there's quite
a bit of variation in how much sophistication the systems provide in
managing what versions of software are installed on your system.
With Debian-related systems like Corel and StormLinux, it's not at all
difficult to set up automated updates; if you, on a weekly basis, run:
   apt-get update; apt-get upgrade -yy
at some time when an Internet connection is "live," this will pull in
all updates to the stuff you have installed.  Distributions that use RPM
(Red Hat, SuSE, TurboLinux, Caldera, Mandrake) tend not to have quite as
comprehensive a "suite" of package management tools, but as all systems
are works in progress, what was lacking last year isn't necessarily so
lacking now...
--
cbbrowne at ntlug.org - <http://www.hex.net/~cbbrowne/lsf.html>
"It's not  about 'Where do you  want to go today?'";  "It's more like,
'Where am I allowed to go today?'"