Re: Vector Linux
- From: Mike Jones <Not@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 10 Sep 2009 09:27:33 GMT
Responding to Steve Ackman:
In <pan.2009.09.09.22.16.13@xxxxxxxxxxx>, on Wed, 09 Sep 2009 22:16:14
GMT, Mike Jones, Not@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
Responding to Steve Ackman:
I have Ubuntu on my wife's desktop, but for myself,
Debian is the favorite desktop flavor, with FreeBSD on the server.
I'm curious. Why three different distros?
Well, four, actually. PCLinuxOS is on the Acer
laptop. It was no muss, no fuss on the wifi. It "just worked." It's
kind of limited in the number of packages it offers, but a laptop is
mostly for travel anyway. You need a browser, e-mail, Usenet, wifi,
ssh, and not really much else... oh, maybe to download the camera to...
so the limited repository isn't that big a deal. I don't care for KDE,
but can tolerate it for the brief periods we're on the road.
FreeBSD on the VIA C3 750Mhz because the CPU claims
to be fully 686 compliant, but in very rare instances, it can only
*really* be a 586. It was running Red Hat 7.x quite well, but when that
reached EOL, nothing else was stable on it. Every Linux distibution I
tried on it crashed. Some wouldn't even boot, while some would run for
random amounts of time before crashing. Even Gentoo wouldn't build on
it as a 686, and by the time I found that out, I'd already wasted 3 days
compiling stuff... or maybe it was LFS that I was 3 days into. Yeah,
come to think of it, Gentoo didn't make it that far.
FreeBSD (5.4 at the time, IIRC) installed and ran
flawlessly on that CPU, and it's been running FreeBSD 24/365 ever since,
and is up to FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE-p11 now.
That's web server, news server, mail server, print
server, and my fallback desktop machine when necessary. This last time
the desktop machine failed, 750Mhz just wasn't cutting it for server
duty PLUS desktop duty. The VIA C7-D 1.5Ghz I have to replace it will
also get FreeBSD.
Why Ubuntu on my wife's desktop? I guess it was
because I'd had Xandros on it, and that was just WAY too... much. I
went the other way and put Vector on it and ended up spending too much
time as admin on it. Ubuntu/synaptic was a good compromise. Not so
bloated as Xandros, and not so time consuming as Vector... and she likes
it, which of course, is the most important thing. Right? ;-)
Why Debian on my desktop? No real reason. I've
tried a bunch of distributions over the last 12 years, and I guess it
was about 4 years ago that I tried Debian again, and thought, "Hey, this
has come a long way since I tried it last." It didn't replace the Red
Hat 6.2 I was still running on the desktop at the time (I ran RH 6.2 for
over 6 years) but it stuck in my mind, so when the RH 6.2 drive finally
died, it was Debian that replaced it.
Back in the days before broadband, I used to buy
those Cheapbyte Mondo bundles. Get 5 current distributions for $6.99 or
whatever they went for. Red Hat, Slackware, Debian, Caldera, and
Mandrake for that kind of money was FREE compared to buying a $59 book
that had 3 distributions inside the covers, which was the way I got my
first full distro, RH 4.1. Before that, I was running Monkey Linux on
UMSDOS, which was a great intro to Linux, but not a very good filesystem
for it.
So... why four different distros? I would have to
reply incredulously, WHY ON EARTH WOULD ANYONE HAVE ONLY ONE??? ;-)
Heh! Guilty as charged!
I work on the "If Slack won't run on it, its borked" (99% accurate so
far!) concept.
This is based on the admin point you made earlier, which is also the
reason I just use one distro. If I make an improvement, once its
debugged, I can propogate it across the network and drop it into my
customisation scripts package for the next thing to be installed from
fresh.
This way I've cut admin, from a fresh machine prior to install, to online
and fully equipped as I like things to be including custom desktops,
firewalls, etc., to about 20 minutes. (Its actually easier now to just
wipe&install than it is to try and fix things after one of my
"experiments".)
The only downside so far is I sometimes forget which machine I'm on and
which account I'm using. ;)
--
*===( http://www.400monkeys.com/God/
*===( http://principiadiscordia.com/
*===( http://www.slackware.com/
.
- References:
- Vector Linux
- From: Dr. Deb
- Re: Vector Linux
- From: Aragorn
- Re: Vector Linux
- From: Mike Jones
- Re: Vector Linux
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- Vector Linux
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