I won't respond to all points in the mail since I don't want to start a distribution war all over again, surfice it to say; I'll agree to disagree with most of your points. Regarding the init respawning too fast, I assume you were trying to set up a serial console? If this is the case and you forget to load the serial module you'll get this behaviour. On Sat, Sep 30, 2000 at 12:07:08PM -0400, Jacob Schmude wrote: > 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 > -- -- Kerry Hoath: kerry at gotss.eu.org Alternates: kerry at emusys.com.au kerry at gotss.spice.net.au or khoath at lis.net.au ICQ UIN: 62823451
