Red Hat Off

I have always used the Red Hat Linux distribution; the last Redhat version I used being RedHat Enterprise Linux release 2.

Recently, as my blog attests, I tried the ubuntu Linux LiveCD version. That was my first foray into non-RedHat Linux. The LiveCD system runs a little too slow for me to be useful in day-to-day operations. To be fair, it did warn me about performance, and my machine only had 256M memory at the time. But, I liked it enough that when it came time to build a Linux system, I chose Debian Sarge (ubuntu is based on Debian).

I installed Debian Sarge on a brand new system. I chose the floppy disk install medium due to necessity. No access to CD-burner at the time. The floppy disk method worked. If you had previously installed any Linux distribution, you probably would have no problem installing Debian Sarge.

I have an observation about Debian Sarge. The base install actually installed the very minimum packages. The Debian installer does not let you choose the packages that you want install. You will want to subsequently install any additional packages that you need after the base install. Contrast that with the RedHat I used(Release 6-9), where you can choose what modules to install during the install process. However, with RedHat, I normally would just install all any way.

To install additional packages on Sarge, you use the apt-get (command-line) or Synaptic (GUI). The Synaptic program is just EXCELLENT. It handles all dependencies for you. You can search for packages easily. It is so good that I may just have to write about it in future blog entries.

In fact, I would say that the Debian package manager system is one feature that would keep me from going back to use RedHat.