Re: [Pan-users] Hello There (OT)

[Carl Wilhelm Soderstrom]

On Fri, Jan 24, 2003 at 03:34:01PM -0700, Duncan wrote:
> Suse gets decent 
> reviews, but keeps at least some of the stuff they develop proprietary.  If I 
> wanted proprietary, I'd have not bothered switching from MS 15 months or so 
> ago.  

My main problem with SuSE is that it has some odd ways of managing system
configuration scripts. I'm in the course of writing (100+ hours of writing)
documentation for a class I'm teaching on linux administration; and the
client insists on using SuSE (at least at the moment). Their way of
configuring a lot of stuff (firewalling especially) probably makes sense
when you use their GUI tools; but trying to manage it by hand (since I've
yet to see a good firewall-config GUI), is totally crocked compared to the
way that most other distros do it.

SuSE goes off and does things its own way. Which is fine, just so long as
they don't bother me with it. When I have to deal with it tho; it tends to
irk me a bit, because I have to change unusual amounts of stuff to get to
what I consider a 'sane' layout. (or else deal with suse's wierd way of
things; whichever the customer wants).

> Debian is supposed to be one of the easiest to maintain, altho it's 
> also supposed to be a bit more difficult than some to originally install.  

truth be told, the only distro that I *ever* found difficult to install (and
I've installed a pretty fair bunch of them, plus all of the BSDs), was SuSE.
Suffice it to say that their installer is hugely bloated (needs 96 MB of
RAM), difficult to understand (not particularly intuitive interface in a lot
of ways), and buggy (it swore up and down that I was installing from a
serial console, when I wasn't; among other problems).

installing distros is easy. just don't be afraid to redo it a few times, and
eventually you'll learn the best way to do it.

I'll leave off now since this is very OT. :)

Carl Soderstrom.
-- 
Systems Administrator
Real-Time Enterprises
www.real-time.com