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Re: Slackware <---> Red Hat



On Sat, 12 Oct 1996, Shlomo Solomon wrote:

> If I make the **wrong** decision (a subjective matter in itself), how
> difficult is moving from one to another (for instance from Slackware
> to Red Hat) ? In other words, how important is it to decide now ?

The answer is multifold :-).

First and foremost, as long as you do no "serious" work on the machine, 
it is fairly painless to change distribs - mkfs and setup.

As for the distributions themsevles:

Three _primary_ (by which, I mean "popular") distributions exist - 
Slackware, RedHat and Debian. Of these, I am acquainted with two, 
Slackware and Debian.

Slackware is simpler to install but more complex to maintain. Upgrading a 
package is not simple and stray files will accumulate. It is, however, 
very good for a newbie.

Debian is more complex and better organized than Slackware. It is very 
complete and rivals, imho, IRIX in its dependency structure. This is not 
surprising considering that among the initial developers of Debian were
people using IRIX extensively.

One of the reasons I am switching from Slackware to Debian (and for me it 
is a very painful process) is the proper SYSV type startup and the 
dependency structure.

It is less easy for the newbie to install and may be an overkill.

---MAV                              (finger for PGP signature block)
My opinions are my own and only my own. Standard disclaimer applies.
Marc A. Volovic (marc@cs.huji.ac.il)       Linguists do it cunningly


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