On 2000-09-30 speakup at braille.uwo.ca said: >Hi >This is mearly my own personal experiences, but I think you'd be >better off with slackware. I have gotten debian to install, but >it's a somewhat tricky process. I tried it recently, though, and it >wouldn't boot correctly on the upgraded machine. I kept getting the >message init: respawning too fast, disabled for five minutes. I >don't know what this means, but slackware does not seem to do this. >I've always been able to install slackware flawlessly and am >happily running it perfectly. The good side of debian, assuming you >get it to work, is the package manager. It handles packages very >nicely indeed, certainly better than rpm or any other packager. >dependencies are taken care of for you automatically, and you can >upgrade the whol thing through the net with two commands. However, >I've found slackware to be more convenient, especially it's init >structure. I find the system V init-style scripts used by debian >and red hat annoying. Slackware has about four scripts, which you >edit manually. Debian's number varies depending on how many >packages you install, and then you need to worry about symlinks. I >hate the runlevel directories, there's symlinks all over the place. >Six directories to manage instead of one. I know debian has >update-rc.d, but it has failed me before. Slackware also has System >V init capability in version 7.0 and later, which is useful if you >install some commercial software that expects this init style, but >the main init is through four scripts, sometimes five. What I find >most annoying about debian, however, is the fact that you can't >edit /etc/mailcap manually. It just gets overwritten. You need to >go in and create a file in /usr/lib/mime/packages containing the >lines and then run update-mime. However, you can't name the file >anything, it needs to be the name of an already installed package. >This does not apply to any other distribution I know of. Of course >the problem with this is that if that package wants to place its >own version of a file there, it will and if your options are set >wrong, will do this without warning you. You may get asked, or you >may not. It depends. Jacob >On Sat, 30 Sep 2000, Charles Hallenbeck wrote: >> Hi Jacob... >> I am torn between upgrading to a current Slackware or switching >>to Debian. I have not talked to Dell yet so I do not know what >>what distro they have built in. I am really tired of messing with >>kludgy hardware and a solid platform would be nice for a change. >_______________________________________________ >Speakup mailing list >Speakup at braille.uwo.ca >http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup Jacob - Those are helpful observations. I have only used Slackware in the past - 2.0, 3.0, 3.5, and now 4.0, so I know its structure pretty well and may just stick with it. It is the awkwardness of upgrading that tempts me to switch. Chuck.
