[LUAU] Redhat vs suse vs?

[George Toft]

Mark Robinson wrote:
> 
> Many if not most of the list has been using Redhat for the last couple
> of years. In the last 4-5 months some of the more active posters have
> started using SUSE, or at least tried it, and now the SUSE people have
> been kind enough to help us spread the Linux banner. Would some of you
> who have used both Redhat and SUSE comment on the pros and cons of the
> distributions?
> 

I've included a previous reply to David and Max, below.  Since I wrote
that some months ago, I've annotated a bit to reflect my new thoughts
and changing technology.  These annotations are in brackets.

> A specific issue which remains a confusion to me is a frequent reference
> to
> the different libraries. Is there a slow drift towards a superset
> distrubution
> that makes it unecessary for me to download and install specific lib
> distributions for specific  packages?

That depends on the distribution.  I've read of guys dl RH 5.x rpms and
installing them on a SuSE 5.2 system and they work.

>From what I've seen, RH made the transition to glibc using the cut over
method.  RH 4.2 was libc5, and RH 5.0 was glibc.  No transition.

SuSE on the other hand, is phasing in glibc support.  SuSE 5.3 has
the glibc libraries, but the distribution is still compiled against
libc5.  SuSE focused on perfecting that which worked, and RH is
developing the cutting edge in library development.  You'll notice
the libc5 version for SuSE is more recent than RH's, as RH stopped
developing against libc5 over a year ago.

I think Rob pointed out that glibc was the wave of the future.  SuSE
recognizes this, and SuSE 6.0, due out in a couple months, and already
available for Beta testing, will be glibc-based.  I'm still pretty
"gun shy" about glibc, so I'll wait for SuSE 6.1 - when the bugs are
worked out.  StarOffice is written for glibc, and accounts for a
large percentage of the SuSE mailing list traffic.  I will stay
with what works.  I don't have time to troubleshoot problems
that are not my own doing (I have plenty of those already).


Personally, I like the company SuSE better than Red Hat.  They
monitor and respond to the questions on the list more than
RH.  I asked for 25 CD's from both companies.  RH blew me off.
SuSE sent me 30.  Now they sent me 210 for the Expo.  SuSE
is hungry for money, and Red Hat is getting tooooo big (especially
with Intel and Netscape (AOL?) pumping money into them).
I buy from those who are hungry as they will go the extra mile
for me.  The big companies don't care if I buy or not.  That's
why I buy from ByteWare instead of CompUSA.


> best Mark Robinson

Quoting from a previous message:

David & Max wrote:
> 
> I'm been hearing some comment on this mailing list about SuSE.  But how
> would you folks rate this distribution over RedHat?  
Say SuSE and you'll get my attention.  But you knew that.

Despite my love for SuSE, I cannot recommend it for beginners.
I have the snapshot, or trial CD from Cheap*Bytes, which is
GPL, so I can make a copy for you.  I have version 5.2.
[I now have the retail 5.3, and I'm not sure I fully
believe this - YaST (the setup tool) is AWESOME and it's
text-based.]

SuSE had a production problem with the first few copies of 
5.3, and it appears the copies being delivered now are all
fixed.  (But then, I got a bad RH5.1 CD and a bad Applixware
CD, so SuSE is not immune to production problems.)

I think Red Hat is the best for beginners, and SuSE is
an excellent choice when you want expand beyond RH.

Specifically, what I found better about SuSE over RH5.0:
- Java worked immediately.  I had to mess with RH for about
  4 hours due to a bad link in the distro.

- The setup and admin tool (yast) is entirely text based.
  This allows remote administration using a menu-based tool.
  (No flames, please, I like tools, I like KDE, it works
  for me and this is my opinion.)
  [I still like KDE, but is has a horrible memory leak that
  forced be to shutdown X every couple days.  I now use
  xfce, which looks amazingly like my wife's control panel
  on her Unix workstation.  Hers is not xfce - it's motif.]

- The rescue disk _is_ the CD, so you get a complete Linux
  system, with all the neat tools to fix your booboos.  RH
  tries to cramp you into a RAM disk version, with minimal 
  tools.  Yes, I've broken both, numerous times, but then
  I learn well when I know what I have to fix.

- yast will adjust your configuration scripts for you after
  you install new packages.
  [Downside - YaST will not do an rpm dependency check prior
  to removing packages.  You can ask it to do one, but it
  won't alert you to destroying your system.  I needed a 
  few more megabytes on my laptop, so I removed jdk and
  something called BSD Database.  That broke perl, which broke
  the hypertext help system, man, and lpd.  Oops.]

- FVWM looks/works better than RH's FVWM.  I know it's the
  same program, but SuSE's looks better.

- (Timidly written) SuSE comes with KDE.

- StarOffice runs without having to go through two pages of
  Waldherr's instructions to get it to work.  Just type 
  ./setup -net  after untarring it and it goes.

- StarOffice doesn't segfault and vaporize near as much under
  SuSE.  When I had it running under RH, it would crash about
  as often as MS Word did (about once/hour or two).  I leave
  it running all the time now.
  [Still true!!!]

- Password security seems to be a notch better with shadow 
  passwords.  I guess a cracker has to look at two files to
  crack out a password.  I tried to make RH's /etc/passwd rw-rw----
  and got some interesting results.  SuSE's /etc/shadow is rw-r-----,
  preventing a non-root user from looking at them.  This
  little trick prevented a common attack, which was demonstrated
  at the security seminar I went to this week.

[More neat SuSE stuff follows]
- The retail SuSE 5.3 comes with a live filesystem CD.  You can
  actually install Linux on a DOS partition and incorporate the
  live filesystem, and run it.  It takes 50MB and requires no
  partitioning and can be removed quickly if desired.  SuSE warns
  of performance and security problems with this method, however.
  Another aspect of using the live filesystem CD is you can free 
  up several hundred MB of HD space by incorporating the live 
  filesystem.  Performance will suffer a bit, so it depends on
  your own situation.

- The SuSE mailing list has fewer opinionated idiots on it than
  Red Hats, meaning there are far fewer (almost zero) flames.
  Unfortunately, some sex site keeps spamming the list about
  once a month.

- Sound!!!  RH offers sndcfg to get a Sound Blaster (or absolutely
  true compatible card - IRQ and IO must match exactly) card
  up and running.  If it's not a Sound Blaster, your out of luck.
  SuSE includes the Open Sound System (OSS) which detects and 
  installs almost any card, and YaST will do the work for you.  
  It worked flawlessly the first time on both my laptop and desktop.

- And need I say "The Manual?"  SuSE' manual is easily 10 times 
  better than RH.  It's better quality and much more informative.
  It actually tells you what goes on during boot.  RH's is pretty
  vague.  For example, I installed RH 5.1, and after rebooting, eth0
  would not initialize.  I have no idea why not, and to book was
  useless.  The RH list didn't help either.  A few weeks later,
  after installing SuSE 5.2 and upgrading to 5.3, the same thing
  happened.  I quick trip to the manual explained how the eth
  devices are initialized, I made a simple edit to a configuration
  file, and it worked.  The SuSE manual is an awesome piece of
  work.  On the downside, it is an obvious translation of a German
  text without the benefit of a spell checker.  But for those of
  us who "kann ein bissen Deutch sprechen" it's not a problem.
[End of neat stuff]

What about RH I thought was better:
- RH5.1 includes AfterStep.

- RH's network configurator is more versatile.
  [I'm not fully convinced of this anymore - RH offers
  easier to use DHCP, but that's about it.]

- RH doesn't clutter up your user's directories with 
  configuration files for programs I'll never use or install.

- RH comes with GIMP.
  [The retail SuSE comes with GIMP 1.0 - RH still has 0.9x.]

- RH 5.0 (Official) comes with MetroX, a commercial X server.
  [This was important to me as I couldn't run XFree86 on my
  laptop - I couldn't get the configuration file right.  But
  I found someone else's on the 'Net, and now I use XFree86 on
  the laptop with no problems.]

- RH 5.1 (Official) comes with a whole 3rd CD full of commercial
  software to try out.  
  [ SuSE comes with about three CD's of stuff - some commercial, 
  some not.]


Is that enough?  Specific questions entertained.

George
-- 
Ever wonder why a quart of spring water costs more than gallon of
gasoline?