On 12/3/05, Fernando Lopez-Lezcano <nando@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Sat, 2005-12-03 at 17:28 -0800, Mark Knecht wrote: > > On 12/3/05, Brian Dunn <job17and9@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > > > So does anybody out there have the best of all worlds? > > > good free documentation, reliable hardware support, > > > binary packaging, a fast audio kernel, and config > > > files that don't get re-written by some user friendly > > > script somewhere that would be oh so convinient except > > > for the whole doesn't work thing? > > > > > > If your system works the way you want it too most of > > > the time, i want to hear your opinion. > > > > > > gratefull, > > > Brian > > > > > > > I have two opinions: > > > > 1) If I want *exactly* what Fernando provides on the Planet site, no > > more and no less, then PlanetCCRMA is the best I know of. It's well > > supported in the audio area by a great guy. It has a good mailing list > > with helpful people. (Of which I hope I'm one once in awhile anyway.) > > Overall very positive, but it has two downsides: > > > > a) If you need ANYTHING that's not part of the Planet apt system then > > be prepared for RPM hell. At least that's my experience. Email, DVD > > stuff, etc. > > Hmmmm, I'd dare say this is a bit extreme :-) Yeah, most probably you are correct, but it's my unfortunatel view of the world of prepackaged distros. They work really well when I use exactly what they provide. As soon as I go outside of that boundry they get dodgy in my experience. > > I'm not saying this is easy, of course. > I'm not saying that it is better or greater than other distros, either. > I'm not saying that I can be objective :-) ;-) :-p As objective as anyone about distro religion and you have 100x more rights to speak you mind based on the work you've done. > > The ammount of work depends on what "anything" is. Anything that is in > Fedora Core should be easy (includes email I guess). Yes, there are many good solutions for email clients. I should not have included this. > Anything in other > apt/yum repositories is usually fine. This is where I ran into many problems and eventually got put off. > If you want to build your own > packages from source you will need to install the required development > packages and maybe that is what you mean by "RPM hell[*]", but I imagine > that should be the case in other distros as well - unless they don't > make a separation between base and developer packages, perhaps that's > the case with gentoo. You may run into stumbling blocks if whatever you > are trying to build depends on newer versions of core packages than the > ones provided by the base distro, that can of course be a problem. That is the problem I ran into many times. I got started with some app on Gentoo and built, for instance, Aqualung. The Aqualung guys used whatever library they wanted to use, and I had no problem finding it on Gentoo. Aqualung worked. Then I wanted to build it on FC and found that the library didn't exist. You would look into installing some RPM, but maybe it didn't come from the same depository I was getting everything else. I start changing apt setup files to get stuff, then forget I've made changes, then download stuff the next day that maybe I shouldn't have downloaded and after a few weeks somethign gets flakey. Clearly this sort of experience is driven by my lack of structure and background in properly administering a Linux machine. I'm sure that FC works well for folks who know what they are doing. (I'm not part of that group.) That said, I still have one FC2/Planet machine here. It's working quite well and probably will for years to come if I don't change things. > > YMMV... > -- Fernando > > [*] usually "RPM Hell" was meant to describe the situation in which you > want to install an isolated package (an RPM in the case of rpm based > distros), and it requires another package you don't have, and after > finding it it requires another, and so on and so forth. This particular > situation is old history, these days you can use dependency resolvers > such as apt, yum or smart to resolve dependencies automatically for > you. > yep.
