RedHat

[Jason Clinton]

Charles Steinkuehler wrote:
>> If I had a nickel for every time I tanked a RedHat system SIMPLY
>> because I wanted to install the latest version of software instead of
>> waiting for RedHat to get around to it in five or six months -- well,
>> I'd start a Linux business. That's what I'd do.
>
> So where can we download your disto?
>

Someday... :)

> Please.  I'm sorry, but to me you are simply whining because you don't
> know how to maintain a RedHat system.  RedHat is not Debian.  Redhat is
> not Gentoo.  RedHat is not Mandrake, or Suse, or even Caldera.  *EVERY*
> one of these disto's does things like low-level init scripts, hardware
> configuration, etc. a bit differently.  To RedHat's credit, most of the
> steps required to tweak their system are documented in the official
> Reference and Customization guides, if you care to read them.  Oh, and
> they're available online, if you don't want to spend the $30 from RH to
> get the dead-tree version:
> http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/linux/

I agree that RedHat is a horse of a different color. I just don't think
it makes a good desktop distro. As I said in the post you replied to but
omitted:

"Linux should be a diverse forest of distros each filling its niche of a
specific need and filling it well. One distro shouldn't even have 20% of
the market. If it does, there's a problem. ("From each according to
their abilities, to each according to their needs.") "

I'm not whinning. I'm arguing. And arguing because I reason that RedHat
makes a horrible desktop distro and futher that where RedHat gets it
wrong, Gentoo and Debian get it right. And I like to argue... damnit! :)

> And you're just plain wrong about using a generic kernel.  I *HAD* to
> use a generic kernel to get my fancy new A7N8X with the 8xAGP NForce2
> chipset working with RH8.  I grabbed a generic 2.4.20 tarball from
> kernel.org, the latest 21-pre and ac patches, and setup a source tree. A
> make menuconfig followed by make dep bzImage modules install
> modules_install, and I was running a new kernel, complete with DMA
> support for my recent chipset.  I have also installed generic kernels on
> various RH7.x systems, and never had any problems.

At the time 7.0 came out, Kernel 2.4.7 was included and RedHat's version
had no less than ~80 patches to it (Including things like USB Dev System
and Supermount). I don't know what 8.0 is like because I don't run it.
But it was _very hard_ to get a vanilla kernel running on 7.0 at the
time because so many things depended on those patches to work. IIRC,
many of the patches that were applied to 2.4.7 have been incorporated in
some way, shape or form in the 2.4.x kernel series by now. I _really_
hope RedHat doesn't do the same thing to their 9.0 series based on
Kernel 2.6

--
Jason Clinton
I don't believe in witty sigs.