OneAndOneIs2

Tue, May 01, 2007

To the surprise of. . .

. . . absolutely nobody, I'd imagine: it looks like Dell will go with Ubuntu when they start selling Linux PCs.

It was the logical choice: Unlike Debian, Gentoo, Slackware & co, it's run by a businessman and so less prone to internal politics; and unlike Suse, Red Hat & co, it's completely free.

Yeah, I know, there's free (as in beer) distros available from Novell & RH, but that's beside the point. With Ubuntu, there's no difference between what home users download for free and what companies pay to install & run. AFAIK, OpenSUSE and Fedora can't make that claim.

And besides, a standard Ubuntu install uses less resources than a standard install of the others, because of the "One app. per task" philosophy. (I mostly like this, but when it means you don't get Firefox if you install Kubuntu because Konqueror is already there. . .)

And at the risk of getting flamed for saying so, RPMs still aren't as good as apt-get. Frankly, after the 'fun' I had with Red Hat a few years ago, I'd take manually compiling from source over RPM. I did just that, in fact, when I used LFS for a while...

Mind you, I'll be surprised if Dell's Ubuntu is completely standard. Whatever else you may say about Ubuntu's desktop, you can't say it's exciting. Why, why, why did they decide brown and grey would be the best colours for a desktop??? Vista is as ugly as sin, but at least the wallpaper makes it look excitingly new and interesting.

Until you start the first app, anyway.

7 comments • Categories: Omni, FOSS, In The News

Comments:

Comment from: hari [Member]

· http://hari.literaryforums.org

Do they have multi-player solitaire in Vista - the most sought after feature of all time?

Permalink 01/05/07 @ 14:37

Comment from: oneandoneis2 [Member] · http://geekblog.oneandoneis2.org/

Actually, I gather that the Solitaire in Vista has even had the cheats taken out of it. It makes up for it by 3D-accelerating the cards, of course. . .

Permalink 01/05/07 @ 15:08

Comment from: Preid [Visitor]

> And at the risk of getting flamed for saying so,
> RPMs still aren't as good as apt-get.

You'll only get flamed because you're not comparing like with like. A RPM is equivalent to a DEB file, a package format. Apt-get is a package management tool. You can use apt-get on Fedora for example.

Permalink 01/05/07 @ 20:22

Comment from: alison [Member] · http://www.creativehedghog.com

rpm's still suck. :)

Permalink 02/05/07 @ 08:36

Comment from: oneandoneis2 [Member] · http://geekblog.oneandoneis2.org/

I was going to give a long, involved answer, but Alison got there first ;o)

Seriously, tho, RPM is not "just" the package format. RPM stands for Red Hat Package Manager - manager, not format.

Wikipedia: "The name RPM refers to two things: a software package file format, and a free software tool which installs, updates, uninstalls, verifies and queries software packaged in this format."

Permalink 02/05/07 @ 09:35

Comment from: RareCactus [Visitor]

· http://rarecactus.blogspot.com/

It's unfair to imply that Slackware has problems with "internal politics."

Debian has had a lot of political issues and disputes. Gentoo has struggled since its creator left for Microsoft. But Slackware is still run by the same guy as always-- Patrick Volkerding.

Now, Slackware is probably not what most desktop users would want, for other reasons... but still.

Also, could you give some reasons for your dislike of RPMs? The only major flaw I'm aware of is that they allow execution of arbitrary shell code as root during the preinstall process. I guess the rationale is that you should trust the binaries that you are installing.

"Dependency hell" is most certainly NOT the fault of the package management system-- it is the fault of the people creating packages. If you are making a package for libfoo, and you forget to mention that it also supplies libbar, some libbar users are going to be unhappy campers later on. This has nothing to do with RPM itself-- it's like blaming Linus Torvalds because TuxRacer got a segfault.

Permalink 09/05/07 @ 06:32

Comment from: oneandoneis2 [Member] · http://geekblog.oneandoneis2.org/

I made no such implication. I can see how it can be interpreted that way tho.

As for my reasons for disliking RPMs: I've never used them without having issues almost immediately. And I can't accept the "blame the package creators" excuse - Even when I've been using nothing but Red Hat and its official packages, I've had problems.

Permalink 09/05/07 @ 09:29