Debian vs Suse

[Jonathan Hutchins]

On Thursday, January 01, 2004 05:04 pm, Karl Schmidt wrote:

> So far I'm really liking what I see.  Libranet earned their money by
> added a few time saving tools. So far I like it better than Redhat. An
> example helps - I needed to install e3 (a tiny text editor I've grown
> used to) and all I did to make this happen was to open the
> Admin-libranet - click on add package from internet - it asks for the
> package name - and it is finished. 

On my RH systems, I would just do "up2date e3", and it would take care of it 
very quickly.  Mandrake's "urpmi", on the other hand, did not work reliably 
and eventually lost the ability even to install packages from the CD's.

The biggest problem with auto-installers is having good sources.  WIth RedHat 
you only get what they package for your distro, and once they've beta'ed the 
next distro version you don't get updated packages except for bugfixes.  With 
Mandrake the mirrors that urpmi knows about are always wrong or broken.  SuSE 
has bad servers listed in it's package tool, but allows you to easily add 
good ones, and the Novell server is good and fast.

With any of the RPM systems, the "rpmfind" tool works great, and gives you 
automated installation of a much broader range of software.