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Re: Which distribution
On Sun, 05 Mar 2000, "Yosi" wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> Let me start by stating that I do not want to start a flame war here,
> arguing which distribution is better. Instead, I am looking for
> opinions and backed up answers. I have bought a new Athlon computer
> and I am not sure which distribution should I install - RedHat 6.1
> (or 6.2 for that matter) or Mandrake 7.0 (I have outrulled the rest
> of the existing distributions out of various reasons).
What do you wnat to do with the machine? It may affect distribution
selection as well.
>
> These are the factors that I find most important in the distribution
> I am looking for:
>
> 1. basic security of the distribution, default security settings
> and so forth. For example, I know that Mandrake let's you choose
> the security level of the of the OS during installation.
Mandrake claims they can audit security level of distribution up to "very
secure" (does not approach to ABC scheme, but their 7-th level of security
_sounds_ reasonable. _sounds_. I did not used this myself, the reason to
this can lead to flame war, so I am omitting it)
It can be nice to have such an audition. However, think about two important
factors: Holes which are not covered by their security auditor are
dangerous, and If the security auditor is compromised....
It is important to remember, that security can not be achieved by choosing
a right distribution, but rather by comitting yourself to the routine work
of wtching out the holes yourself. Or using the answer I omitted due to
high risk of flames.
It seems that Mandrake can be more crackable than RedHat, just because from
the cracker's point of view Mandrake is the known foe. On the other way,
RedHat security is very strange, somewhere zero, somewhere high. May be the
right answer would be choosing Mandrake, and mending it up to desired level
of security by hand.
> 2. How fast does the manufacturer issues patches to security exploits
> from the moment they have become publicly known.
I have no information about RedHat or Mandrake. Baicly you do not wait for
manufacturer to issue a patch, but you look for it somewhere else.
> 3. This is specific to Mandrake - I know that Mandrake optimize their
> packages for Pentium (they claim up to 30% speed ups). Will these
> optimized packages cause any problems when executed on an AMD
> Athlon cpu?
A strange question. It will run more slowly than on processor which was the
target during compilation. Basicly, you can recompile entire distro with
your specific optimisations (I did it on my choise of Linux distro, where
it is trivial.) K7 binary compatible with P5MMX. Pipelining is different,
so the heuristics which are good for P5MMX instruction set probably will
flush the i/d-cache on K7. So it will run slowly. But problems? Sure you
will have, no-one had cancelled the Murphy law. But there are not any
problems you can face just because MMX instructions were issued here and
there.
--
Cheers,
Omer Mussaev / tel 051308214 / http://www.linuxlizard.de/omer
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