On Friday 26 July 2002 23:54, you wrote:
I dislike paying money every six months to stay on top of
> the latest RH or other releases. With apt/dpkg/deb, I don't have to pay
> and the upgrade can be gradual if necessary.
<short_version>
Me too. That's why I like the Mandrake Update feature.
</short_version>
There are a lot of different distros. Most of them are undergoing fairly
rapid evolutionary change. No one among us is intimately familiar with them
all.
Nor should we be. That would require a single human being to grok the
combined, but divergent, output of literally hundreds of brilliant
programmers, designers and futurists. Ouch. My brain hurts simply trying to
imagine that.
Some time ago I decided to stop shopping for "the perfect distro" and learn
to use the one I already had. Shopping for the perfect distro felt too much
like the endless cycle of "upgrades" I had paid for when I still used
Microsoft products. I think that decision has served me better than almost
any other I have made since I started to use Linux in earnest. I ask quite a
bit of my copy of Mandrake. The better I learn how to use it, it seems, the
better it works. That's about what I expected to happen.
The past week I have installed a minimalist installation (basically servers
only -- no GUI at all) on a spare machine, upgraded a kernel, Apache and PHP.
I also added a web cam yesterday and that required installing a lot of
software by hand. If I waited for someone to build an RPM, I would be waiting
too long to apply security upgrades and might _never_ see the world through
the eye of my webcam.
The best distribution is the one I can use most effectively to do the chores
at hand. Had I stumbled across Suse or Debian earlier I might now be
championing them as others do. But, when RedHat 5.2 proved to be too much to
learn all at once, I encountered Mandrake and have been with it ever since.
It gave me a vaguely familiar user interface and set up all the essential
pieces of my hardware during the installation process. Red Hat had fought
tooth and nail over everything and had proved to be the most frustrating
computer experience I had ever had because of that. My understanding is that
RH and some of the others are now pretty good at recognizing hardware during
the install. That's okay ... I'll stick with Mandrake until it breaks or
until there is something I ask of it that it simply cannot do.
So far, it does everything I need it to do except dispense M&M's.
Bill
-- 12:42am up 11 days, 5 min, 4 users, load average: 0.00, 0.02, 0.00"I'm thinking of going back to Windows; in Linux, none of the viruses seem to work."
http://organic-earth.com Organic urban gardening. With photos.
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