[TAG] ISP email goes down in flames

[Mike Orr]

On 11/15/05, Adam Engel <bartleby.samsa at verizon.net> wrote:
> Now that you've brought it up...I'm looking for a new distro, possibly.
>   My nine-year-old Dell Inspiron is no longer inspired or even "on," so
> I'm looking for a basic no frills desktop for work -- vim, Open Office,
> Firefox, Thunderbird, Abiword on top of KDE or GNOME or both -- plus
> WindowMaker, FVWM etc. for mood swings, and "play" -- trying to learn
> Shell Scripting and Perl, and Networking at the "hobbyist's" leveliti,
> i.e. just for play, not pay or necessity like the basic word-processing
> tools and email/web connection.   For me, the difference between one
> distro and another is basically the install.  I was using Redhat 6 for
> a while, then two years ago received SuSE 9.0 as a xmas gift and was
> happy not to have spend days with HOWTOSs and manuals trying to get
> everything up and running.  YaST took care if the whole deal in a few
> hours.  But after the initial installation, I found the whole package
> management system a hindrance rather than  a helper, and prefer to just
> download the source files when I need an upgrade or new application. he
>   That said, it seems like the real difference for me between one distro
> and another would be the package management system for installation and
> quick jump-start (partition, connectivity etc.) of a new system.
> o
> I was thinking of switching to Debian, which I'm somewbhat familiar
> with because the Mac OS uses DEB rather than RPM, an earlier TAG
> discussion regarding Gentoo pointed out some problems I was not aware
> of.  Also, there's the above-mentioned Mandriva, Slackware, etc.   I
> frequently go to the Debian site for  updates/info etc. which is a plus
> for them -- I think.  But then, I mostly go to GNU for upgrades or new
> apps, so again, I'm wondering what the real difference is beyond the
> Deb or RPM package managements systems.  Once the system is installed,
> I'll have to  stick  with its recommendations and dependencies,(for,
> say, a Kernel upgrade) or download a source file and try not to mess
> up.
>
> Sage advice, anyone?

What about unsage advice? :)  The main differences between distros are:
- the install program
- the runlevel layout (/etc/init.d/* and all that stuff)
- the location of configuration files and runtime data (heavily
modified from upstream or not)
- how many packagee are included (as many as possible or a highly-tested subset)
- binary packages or compile-it-yourself
- the graphical front-ends for sysadmin tasks

I've switched between Debian, Gentoo, and Fedora.  (And Slackware
years ago.)  It's mainly a job of reinstalling the packages you use,
and porting your customizations in /etc .  Since most of the software
is third-party (konsole, vim, Firefox, and Thunderbird for me),
they'll work exactly the same.  Except when they don't.  (That is, if
any default configuration settings are different.)  Maybe the new
defaults are "good enough" and you can live with them.  You can delete
the stub /home directory and mount your old one, but watch out for
programs that are such a different version they "upgrade" your config
file in a backward-incompatible way.  You'll have to synchronize the
user IDs and group IDs if they're different (see the manpages for
"passwd", "group", "chown", "chgrp", "vipw", "vigr").  I mount the old
system read-only as /mnt/DISTRO for several weeks so I can quickly
look up any configuration settings.  Some distros (at least Gentoo)
you can "chroot /mnt/DISTRO /bin/bash" in a konsole tab to run a
command in its old environment.

Don't spend much time thinking about the installer because you'll only
use it once.  One frustration with Fedora is it has a nice elaborate
installer, but then you want to run one of its features again and it's
an "installer only" thing.  I had to edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf, and I
saw the comment at the top saying it was generated by pyxf86config.  I
thought, "Wow, a new configurator, and it worked pretty well the first
time.  Let's try it."  But pyxf86config does not exist, so I guess
it's only on the install disk.  In Gentoo, the same commands you use
to configure initially are the ones you'll use later, so even though
it takes an extra hour or two it's worth the investment.

DEB and RPM are just different ways to do the same thing.  They've
borrowed so much from each other that I doubt there's much different
in features.  With DEB each package contains  a configuration
directory; with RPM it's all in one configuration file.  RPMs come in
both binary and source flavors, and you use the 'rpm' tool for both. 
DEBs are binary only and use the 'dpkg' tool to install, or 'dpkg-deb'
to inspect/manipulate the package.  Source files (unless it has
changed recently) use the original upstream source tarball (trivially
renamed) plus a patch file, and a family of commands starting with
'dpkg-source'.  I find the 'dpkg' command-line options more intuitive
than the 'rpm' ones ( '-i' for install and upgrade, vs rpm '-U' for
upgrade;  '-s' for summary, '-l' to list matching package names,
'--force-THIS' to do something unsafe).  'rpm' has sixty-six options
to wade through, but it does group them logically (all query options
go with '-q').  Of course, most people nowadays use a front end like
'apt' or 'yum' or something to automatically download and install in
one step.

If you like Debian, take a look at Ububtu and Kubuntu.

As for installing your own software, you don't have to use the
distro's packages if you don't want to (besides the small number of
'essential' packages).  If I'm using a brand-new version or beta and I
don't want to wait for the package, I just  install from source into
/usr/local.  In practice there's only a small number of programs I'm
so particular about, so it doesn't get unwieldly.  I often use Python
betas and locally install all Python modules I use, and just leave
/usr/bin/python alone for the distro to use.  GNU 'stow' is a "poor
man's package manager" that's easy to use, and I'd highly recommend it
if you do local installs.  You install your program into
/usr/local/stow/PACKAGE-VERSION, and run 'stow' to create symlinks in
/usr/local/bin, etc.  You can even keep several versions in
/usr/local/stow simultaneously and switch between them easily.  The
alternatives are to make DEBs or RPMs out of them (time-consuming to
learn how), or use a feature like 'dpkg-equivs' (?) to tell the
package manager you have FOO installed elsewhere.  But it's easier to
just leave the package manager ignorant.

--
Mike Orr <sluggoster at gmail.com> or <mso at oz.net>