On Tue, 29 Jul 2003, dave m mehler wrote: > As to which is better it depends on what you > like. Yes, I agree: questions like this belong more in an advocacy group. > Redhat is more automated, there facilities work > more out of the box, they have many variants of > configuration tools, but they also install a > great many dependencies for such luxuries. But much of this is tied up in the GUI, and the system will much the same to a blind user, especially if the GUI stuff is not installed, regardless of the distribution. But there are differences: 1. RH systems can be upgraded in place without a re-install. 2. The sheer popularity of RedHat can make it easier to find good 3rd party packages already built (like the alsa drivers discussed below), so one does not have to roll your own, or build from source. This may not matter, though, for some users or applications, like servers, which often should be stripped down to only what they need to do, so as to harden them against exploits, and make maintenance easier (a lot of security update packages can thus be irrevelant, if not installed on your system). 3. Red Hat has been faster about posting security updates in the past (much larger organization, more employees). 4. The above differences may or may not be important to a particular user or system. > Slackware is a more get to know your system OS, > you'll learn why and how things work more if you > go with it. Because you have to (no other way)? But blind users probably need to learn text mode configuration anyway, and that is possible on any distro. Some more comments below, especially for viavoice. > On 29 Jul 2003 17:55:21 -0000 "Krishnakant > Ramesh Mane" <krmane@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > > I don't know what should I go for. my first > > choice was redhat 9 but alas IBM ViaVoice is > > not to be used with yasr on rh9. Actually, someone promised in a recent post to tell how he got viavoice working on RH9, once he got it organized. I can point to the principles of how to do it, but a better way is to post a script to automate it on say, the blinux archive site. Here are the principles: You install the older libs from RH8 under a special dir, say, /usr/lib-old. You would need to use some special options (--relocate=<old>=<new> --badreloc, maybe --force, or --nodeps) to rpm to get them there. Don't try this unless you fully understand what you are doing, since if you interfere with the current libs, you can make your system unusable (which is why an installation script is needed for newbies). Then you make a script front end to viavoice to start it with the environmental variables necessary for it to use the proper libs. More on that can be found in /usr/share/doc/glibc-2.3.2/FAQ -- search for LD_LIB . Other apps use this technique, such as mozilla: you can read the mozilla front end script to see how they did it, and modify a copy to your needs (if not installed, you could get someone to send you a copy). > > advantage in using slackware 9.0? I have > > redhat 8 for comparison as it can run yasr > > with viavoice. If you already have Red Hat 8 or 9 installed, maybe you should just go with it. An old pentium 200 MHZ or better, with a minimal text install could be used as a terminal to your server, if you have one available, with say, RH8 and viavoice on it. The only reason why you wouldn't go with a lowly 486 instead, would be the resource requirements of the soft-speech package -- textmode stuff runs fine otherwise. You don't really have to stay with the latest release, you know. The upgrade treadmill is for M$ windoze users. Later on, when the details of getting viavoice to work on the server are fleshed out better, you could switch to that, if desired. > > with yasr? which of these three. namely > > redhat 8, slackware 9.0 and mandrake 9.1 can > > be the best? I hope I don't hear any more about this type of advocacy issue (see comp.os.linux.advocacy). The differences just aren't that important, especially to a text or command line user. > > again I urgently need to take a desission and > > so please help. So you see by now, that it really isn't that urgent or critical: you could reasonably stay with what ever you have already, and it's easy to change your mind after you have more experience, and want to experiment. > > lastly I have an on board sound card on my > > machine on the lab it is probably ac 97 or > > some thing. which of the above will support > > it. That's a kernel issue, and should be similar on any distro. You could probably look around at the Red Hat rawhide archives to see if a 2.6test2 kernel and utils.... Naw; bad idea for a newbie (2.6 includes the alsa drivers, and is getting fairly stable, close to production release). Go to http://freshrpms.net/ instead, and download their already packaged alsa drivers for the 2.4 kernel that comes with RH8 and RH9. Don't forget to look for the other alsa util and tools packages while you are there. No, I don't know if alsa supports your sound stuff, only that alsa supports more than the older OSS drivers did, and that if it isn't supported with that, you are unlikely to get it to work at all (so in that case, you might need to buy... something). Best wishes, LCR -- L. C. Robinson reply to no_spam+munged_lcr@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx People buy MicroShaft for compatibility, but get incompatibility and instability instead. This is award winning "innovation". Find out how MS holds your data hostage with "The *Lens*"; see "CyberSnare" at http://www.netaction.org/msoft/cybersnare.html _______________________________________________ Blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list