[NTLUG:Discuss] Linux Dist.

[Christopher Browne]

On Sat, 05 Aug 2000 12:41:43 EST, the world broke into rejoicing as
Steve Baker <sjbaker1 at airmail.net>  said:
> 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.

Between that and "script-oriented" schemes (I rather like cfengine), if
you need more "by hand" control, you can certainly have that.  I agree
with you that if you know how to control things by hand, the differences
between the "fancy tools" won't matter.  Indeed, a significant problem
is that an upgrade of "Linuxconf" may prove confusing if they change
it enough...

> > 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 seem to recall names based on a "dragon" motif, like "Drake."

> > 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*.

It's easy enough to make it completely automated; if you want it a tad less
automated, try:
    apt-get update; apt-get upgrade -yy -d
which will download the updates, put them in /var/cache/apt/archives
and _not_ install them.
--
cbbrowne at hex.net - <http://www.hex.net/~cbbrowne/lsf.html>
To err is human, to really screw things up requires a computer.