On Tue, 8 Aug 2006, Stephen Frost wrote:
* Alex Turner (armtuk@xxxxxxxxx) wrote:
First off - very few third party tools support debian. Debian is a sure
fire way to have an unsupported system. Use RedHat or SuSe (flame me all
you want, it doesn't make it less true).
Yeah, actually, it does make it less true since, well, it's really not
all that true to begin with.
What you're probably intending to say is that fewer companies say "Works
with Debian!" on their advertising material or list it as "officially
supported". I've had *very* few problems running commercial apps on
Debian (including things like Oracle and IBM SAN management software).
Generally it's just take the rpms and either install them *using* rpm
(which is available in Debian...) or use alien to convert them to a
tarball and/or deb.
there's a huge difference between 'works on debian' and 'supported on
debian'. I do use debian extensivly, (along with slackware on my personal
machines), so i am comfortable getting things to work. but 'supported'
means that when you run into a problem you can call for help without being
told 'sorry, switch distros, then call us back'.
even many of the companies that offer support for postgres have this
problem. the explination is always that they can't test every distro out
there so they pick a few and support those (this is one of the reasons why
I am watching ubuntu with great interest, it's debian under the covers,
but they're starting to get the recognition from the support groups of
companies)
David Lang
