FreeLists / arachne / [arachne] Re: DOS only or?

[Steve <steve@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Arachne at FreeLists---The Arachne Fan Club!

On Thu, 8 May 2008, Ray Andrews wrote:

> Anyway, I'm now retiring from work on Arachne and it's long past time
> I took another stab at Linux or BSD. What would you recomend?
> Debian or Ubuntu sound good to me.
  Debian is "pure" in that it doesn't include *anything* proprietary, and 
it even goes so far as to make it very unobvious about how to obtain 
anything like that.   (No acroreader, limited multimedia out of the 
box, etc.)  You can install a very minimal Debian if you want, with no X 
at all.
  Ubuntu includes packages for acroreader, win32 codecs, etc. so 
"proprietary" is a lot easier, but also comes a lot more bloated.  Ubuntu 
comes with Gnome.  Kubuntu comes with KDE.  Xubuntu comes with XFCE.  You 
could, of course disable the Desktop Environments if you wanted, but the 
Ubuntus (and Kubuntu especially) are designed to be more or less drop-in 
Windows(tm) replacements.  I've read of some problems with the latest, 
8.04, with certain hardware, but the Xubuntu (least bloated) 7.10 that 
runs on my wife's machine has been trouble-free.
  With the *.deb packaging system used by Debian and Ubuntu, installing 
precompiled packages is as easy as "apt-get install firefox"  It downloads 
the binary package, unpacks it, checks that all the dependencies are met, 
fetches anything you need but don't have, and then installs it all.
> I've also liked what I hear about Slackware.
  Slackware's package management doesn't handle dependencies well. 
Reminds me of the way *rpms used to be.  Huge pain in the backside if you 
ask me.  Package managers *should* handle dependencies.  I don't even 
recall what the native package system is, probably because I rarely used it.
> Then there's BSD ...
  Technically, BSD branched into FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD, and then 
there are a few minor distributions built on those.  The one other than 
FreeBSD I tried was Freesbie, a LiveCD that you can run without even 
touching your hard drive.  (Come to think of it, I think that one's built 
on FreeBSD anyway.)  All the BSDs are capable of CLI-only/SVGA installs if 
you're so inclined.
"pkg_add -r firefox"  does the same thing as the apt-get install command 
above.  Binaries tend not to be particularly up to date in *BSDs so you'll 
likely end up building a lot more of your own.  That's more along the 
lines of "cd /usr/ports/www/firefox; make install"  The source is 
downloaded, dependencies checked, built, installed.  Often times, an 
ncurses type configuration needs to be completed before the build begins.
> I like things simple, functional, reliable, understandable and
> *very* well documented. I've heard that the documentation with
> Gentoo is fantastic.
  It's been a few years since I tried Gentoo.  I tried building it on this 
machine but the VIA CyrixIII threw it a curve.  99% of the time, it's 
completely i686 compatible, but there was one thing it tried to build in 
Gentoo, that failed to recognize i686 compatiblity.  After I'd put about 
72 hours into building it, and then had it fail, I moved on to something 
else.  A lot of the Gentoo tools are *BSD in origin though, so if you're 
set on running Linux, but want to do it "the *BSD way," Gentoo would be 
the one.
  Documentation for FreeBSD is fantastic as well.  The jumping off page 
for docs is at http://www.freebsd.org/docs.html but by far the most oft 
used doc will be "The Handbook,"
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/
Generally, you have this installed locally, so you don't have to be online 
to access it.  This will have everything you need to know about the base 
system.
  And if you're looking for the ultimate file system, zfs is available for 
FreeBSD, but not for Linux.  I keep thinking I want to play with it, but I 
probably won't get to it until winter.
> Glitz, pizzazz and whoop-de-doo showmanship
> I don't want. And I tend to like to do things in the most
> direct way even if it's superficialy a bit more difficult.
  They're all direct.  Read the documenation.  Do what it says.  ;-)

  Of course, the Desktop Environments (Gnome/KDE/XFCE) are getting to be a 
lot more like Redmondware in that certain functions aren't documented well 
at all, so the best way to find stuff in the pointy-clicky way is to just 
keep pointing and clicking until you eventually find what you want.
  No Gnomes or KDEs anywhere in this household!

--
Steve Ackman
http://twoloonscoffee.com       (Need beans?)
http://twovoyagers.com          (glass, linux & other stuff)
                 Arachne at FreeLists                  
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