[NTLUG:Discuss] Linux Dist.

[Steve Baker]

Christopher Browne wrote:

> "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

I learned to use the command-line tools (or hand editing the config files) -
so these things also seem identical across distro's as far as I'm concerned.
 
> 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;

SuSE has YAST (Yet Another Setup Tool) and YAST2 (You guess!)

Dunno about Mandrake - the early Mandrake distro's were more or less
straight ripoffs of RedHat - but they may have diverged by now.

> I'm fairly sure they have their own system administration packages.

Since ease of configuration is the #1 selling point for a distro, it
would be suicidal not to have *something*.

> 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.

Yikes!  I'd find that pretty scarey.  I like to KNOW what I changed!  If
my system suddenly refuses to reboot or something, I'd like to know what
I did to provoke that - having the system quietly go off and upgrade itself
every time I read my email sounds *dangerous*.

>  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...

Yes - but RPM's are currently the de-facto standard...I find the SuSE
package management to be pretty reasonable using YAST.

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