[2274] in SIPB_Linux_Development
Re: Linux Athena questions
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Derek Atkins)
Thu Oct 22 09:41:54 1998
To: tb@MIT.EDU (Thomas Bushnell BSG)
Cc: linux-dev@MIT.EDU
From: Derek Atkins <warlord@MIT.EDU>
Date: 22 Oct 1998 09:40:15 -0400
In-Reply-To: tb@MIT.EDU's message of Wed, 21 Oct 1998 10:43:46 -0400
tb@MIT.EDU (Thomas Bushnell, BSG) writes:
> Also, it would help me (new question) if people could briefly indicate
> what their actual experience has been as a user of different
> distributions. If you've installed it once, or ran it for three
> years, or whatever, let me know.
I've used SLS, Slackware, and RedHat. I admit that I haven't had much
experience with other distributions 1st-hand. I think I was one of
the major forces behind choosing RedHat for Linux-Athena. At the
time, it was the most mature distribution (debian still had problems)
and better it had a real company trying to make real money sitting
behind it.
I don't mean to say that other distributions aren't solid Linux
platforms, nor do I mean to imply that other distributions wouldn't
work. At this point in time I think there are plenty of distributions
that could easily provide a healthy platform to Linux-Athena.
I think that a true port of "Athena" to Linux will have to make some
major packaging decisions. In particular, I think you'll have to
either:
1) Abandon the Linux packaging system and use only track
2) Abandon track and use only the Linux packaging system, or
3) Figure out some way to merge the two during updates, perhaps
by tracking athena but updaing packages for OS upgrades.
Depending on which direction you choose, the actual distribution might
not matter all that much.
> My experience has been that I ran Debian at home for a long time with
> no problems, and the FSF has run Debian with no problems. (Debian's
> installation was not clueless-user-friendly [it's supposed to be a
> little better now] but that's irrelevant for an Athena port.) I now
> run SuSE at home, which works seamlessly.
As I said, at this point in time there are plenty of reasonable Linux
distributions to choose from. From a support perspective, I think
choosing one with a real company behind it is a far better move than
choosing one with a bunch of volunteers. From personal experience I
know that volunteers can sometimes be very lax in the amount of
support they provide. ;-)
> Thomas
-derek
PS: FWIW, I don't know which option I'd choose in merging an Athena
update into Linux-Athena. There are good arguments for and against
each option, and I haven't spend enough time thinking about it to come
to a personal decision on which option I prefer. YMMV.
--
Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board (SIPB)
URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/ PP-ASEL-IA N1NWH
warlord@MIT.EDU PGP key available
