> I never use the config tools, I was referring to things like dselect, you have a point there with dselect; most people will admit it's pretty sucky. the great 'hidden knowlege' about debian, IMHO; is that you should only install a basic system with the media, then apt-get everything else. trying to choose the obvious path, and selecting packages from the installer, is a bit more painful and clumsy. of course, this is predicated on you knowing what the packages are called, and what they do; so it's not a newbie way to do it. :) still, if you've installed Linux at least once before; you should have some idea what you're looking for, at least enough to get a workable system. The premise of a lot of this discussion is "what should I migrate *to*, from RedHat?" IMHO, if you've used RH for a bit; you have enought knowlege to make a go of debian, without too much trouble. > the lack > of a basic XF86 configuration during install, hardware detection (ie, kudzu), > a few prompts for system configuration during install... It would solve 90% > of the install issues people have. A few other items include no skeleton > equivalent of rc.local, lack of useful sample configuration files (depends on > the package), poor documentation.. I think that's enough for now. I won't go over this point by point; but will say that I do not view all of these as problems. > Debian is built on the premise that you should have to do absolutely everything > the most difficult way possible, perhaps to scare off any lowly creature that > isn't worthy. no; I'll go so far as to say debian is 'by geeks, for geeks'. (almost) everything is in simple, logical places; so long as you don't expect your hand to be held. I won't say it's perfect; I rather prefer redhat's init scripts by a fair margin; but aside from that, the packages tend to put things in the right places, and give you helpful default configurations, and even help in configuration. cases in point: when you install a Mail Transport Agent in debian, whether it be sendmail, postfix, exim, or even nullmailer; debian gives you dialogs to help you get a basic (i.e. non-embarrassing) configuration. RedHat packages do not; and avowedly *won't* in the Fedora project. here at Real-Time; Nate & I regularly install a package on a debian box, to see how they made it work, because the RPM for that package is either shoddy, broken, or nonexistent. We put faith in debian to have a sane installer, put the files in sane places, and even apply some nifty patches to it to make it behave in a more sane fashion. (compare the debian nullmailer package, to the stock tarball.) we also trust debian to remove all the files and restore the system to a sane state, when we uninstall the package. something we historically haven't been able to even remotely count on from RedHat. > > probably. it's the simplest upgrade path, and hopefully the least painful... > > but I don't have full faith in the Fedora organization to *not* become > > another Debian, just with a different package format. (and a lot less > > maturity in their quality-control process, since they're newer). > > Simple? Please, it's like moving into a cardboard box from a townhouse. what, going from RedHat to Fedora? Carl Soderstrom. -- Systems Administrator Real-Time Enterprises www.real-time.com _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list