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Debian vs. RedHat



Hi,

Several weeks ago I promised to send a summary of my personal experience
using debian vs. RedHat. I've been terribly busy since, so it has taken
some time.

Let me start from the end: after trying both RedHat 5.0 and Debian
1.3.1, I downgraded back to RH 4.2, as it's the only system that
currently supports all of my demands (more on that later). 

This report will assume experience with RH, since that seems to be the
distribution most of the people here (me included) know best. RH will
serve as the baseline, with Debian's pros and cons listed relative to
it.

1. Installation:
One of Debian's greatest shortcomings is a very inconvenient
installation interface. 'dselect' delivers all the features of redhat's
'glint', and more, but it's use is cumbersome, non-intuitive and slow.
The result is that installation is a very long process. I did it twice,
and it took me SEVERAL HOURS, even in the second time. This is partly
due to the long selection and re-selection process (for packages with
sependency problems). On the other hand, most of that time was spent on
interactive configuration scripts, run throughout the installation. I
really liked these, and felt that they give a much better control over
the system, however I think that a default configuration should have
been available in most cases, allowing for later fine-tuning. The
ability to abrt the installation and return to it later, with dselect
remembering the exact stage at which each package was left (installed
but not configured, installed and badly configured, etc.) is a very
strong plus.
To be fair, I must mention that dselect is about to be replaced by a
much better utility, which is already available. This should happen
really soon, as debian 2.0 has already been frozen (information
according to Amos).

2. Maintenance, configuration and updating:
Debian IS superior. No doubt about it. Almost all the packages I checked
had good configuration scripts, that let you fine-tune the package for
your needs, without hiding the details of the configuration behind a
GUI. A refreshing example was handling of the magicfilter package. This
package, available on redhat as well, is much better than the filters RH
installs by default during the installation. On RedHat, installing it
means reading the instructions, editing printcap, and putting two one
binary and one of many available filters in appropriate places. On
Debian, the whole process is automated via a configuration script that
comes with the package, yet you still control all the parameters you
should. 
Though RH now has the autoupdate scripts, debian's support for that kind
of on-going update is much more mature, flexible and elaborate. A very
nice feature indeed.

3. Avialable packages and completeness of the installation:
It's well known that debian has more packages than any other
distribution. The variety is indeed dazzling. I especially liked the
excellent documentation, which seemed to be much more extensive than in
RedHat, and even included optional doc packages such as important RFCs.

4. Finish and touch:
RedHat wins in that category. I found several small features that were
either lacking or annoying under debian. For instance: 
- 'man' by default uses a pager with no scrollback option.
- the old problem with mapping the delete key in X applications is still
present in   debian
- when logging out from a VC, the screen isn't cleaned

I'm sure there are similar things that would annoy a debian user when
moving to RedHat, but hey - I'm writing about my personal experience.
Anyway, most of these things are really easy to solve, so they shouldn't
count too much.

5. Suitability for a 'production line' system:
This comparison was done between RedHat 5.0 amd Debian 1.3.1
Currently these are the latest stable versions of the two distributions.
RH 5.0 already uses glibc, which will only be included in Debian 2.0 (to
be released very soon).
One of my main uses for the system is running heavy mathematical
simulations. I run both C/C++ code and matlab. With RedHat 5.0, I
ancountered severe problems that I didn't manage to solve when trying to
compile my code. Compilation exited with an internal compiler error on
code that compiled cleanly both on earlier versions of RedHat (4.1 and
4.2) and on many other UNIX variants (SGI and SUN, for instance). I
attribute that to problems in glibc, not in the distribution per se.
However, that meant I could not use RH5.0 for my needs.
In Debian I faced two different problems. While there was no problem
with the compilation itself, there was a strange bug with the behaviour
of 'make', that caused it to exit with an error, claiming not to have
objects that it had just compiled. Running 'make' several times would
eventually make all the needed objects. This problem could be solved by
kludges in the makefile, but it was really annoying. Instaling the
latest available make??.deb package didn't help.
While that problem I could live with, the second one was something I
couldn't. Installing Matlab seemed to go on fine, but when trying to run
it, it either exited with segmentation fault without coming up, or
(depending on the way it was started) came up, but was useless, failing
on the simplest operations with strange errors, and not even being able
to quit the session cleanly. No similar problems were ever encountered
on RedHat versions 4.1 to 5.0. It seems that the Linux version of Matlab
was built against RedHat. This is a real problem since sources are not
available for matlab, so the problem cannot be traced properly and one
more or less has to rely on the vendor to solve it.

Right now I downgraded back to RH 4.2, since I had to quickly get my
system into full production status, and had no time to try and fix the
problems somehow. When Debian 2.0 is released, I will certainly try it.
Right now, none of the two latest distributions suits my needs, which is
quite sad, since they both seem to be very good systems in most
respects.



Tuvik


-- 
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               Tuvik Beker
      P.O. Box 571, Givatayim 53104
Tel. (972) 3 5714436    Fax. (972) 3 5334349
         becket@shum.huji.ac.il
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