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part B of Starbuck report, and now moving to Bero
* either because of RPM being broken. or some other bug, I found that
almost all my packages were installed without updating the rpm DB well.
e.g. perl was installed, and rpm -qa showed it, but rpm -qf
/usr/bin/qmail showed no ownership, and installing later RPMs that
depended on it resaulted in dependency check failure (this package needs
/usr/bin/perl, /bin/sh, etc.)
* apperently locate was kicked out in favour of slocate (good move, but
why not leave a simbolic link or a warning?) and updatedb's equivelant
is slocate -u. make sure you don't have a 50 gig NFS server mounted when
you run it, like I did the first time :-) exclude mount directories,
etc.
* no manpage for slocate, man locate will tell you it's for slocate
though (guys! give us some symlinks here!)
* to switch between gnome/KDE/Anotherlevel there is a desktop switching
app burried in some menu called "system" in gnome and it won't do gnome
-> KDE on the fly anymore (not that I need that, it just means I won't
test it until I log out from X, report will come tommorow.)
* Xdm/Gdm is not run from /etc/inittab anymore, it's a regular init.d
script. not a bad idea. I'd add Dan bernstein's "supervise" to make it
relaunch if it dies, like inittab used to do it before.
* both SuSE 6.0 and now RHL 5.9 give green/red ok/fail messages when
init.d scripts start or stop. HP-UX envy?
* pcmcia was not linked to rc[2-5].d even though I used it during the
instalation.
in any case, it's working nice, now I move over to BeroLinux 1.1 on the
second laptop.
* BeroLinux is claiming to be based on RHL 5.2 plus updates. it is
distributed from Germany and the author takes more freedom with
encryption software.
* the main point of pride for Bernhard Rosenkraenzer
<bero@microsoft.sucks.eu.org> is the way the entire distro is rebuilt
with pgcc. once with pentium optimization, and another with K6 specific
ones. I'm testing the i586 version.
* installing off FTP wouldn't work, as the PCMCIA floppy couldn't be
mounted. the image for supp is the size of a 2.8 meg floppy. I assume
it's a bug, created a CD and booted, so far it's all smooth. Bero lets
you upgrade automatically from any redhat upto 5.2 (haven't tested 5.9
obviously), I'll now be upgrading from 5.0.
* install seems to be based on the new tree concept used in Starbuck,
this guy really is up to date :)
* Bero is generously dotted with security packages from all over the
place. SSleay, pgp (5! why?), ssh 1 and 2, server and client and more.
* Qmail is included as a sendmail alternative but from an RPM I don't
favour (and btw, I think it may be illegal to distrib Qmail as
binary..)
* other cool additions were the siag office, xinetd, Ted (a WYSISYG RTF
editor), Maverik (a VR application development package, can drive two
Vodo cards seperately if you have stereo screen headset), Mesa, aalib
and a gimp plugin for it, BeroFTPD (a wu with home patches) with a KDE
config frontend, Bero's listserver with a CGI interface, full CODAfs
suite of tools, Samba 2.0.3 and SWAT, RPM both current and latest beta,
BIND 8.1 and beta 8.2, Xcdroast and standalone cdrecord and then 4(!)
different KDE CD-R frontends, Wine and TWIN, full gnome 1.0.2 and KDE
1.1 (come with Balsa, why doesn't redhat?) but Enlightenment DR15.0
only, Truetypes for X, lesstiff... (ok, you get the point, it's loaded
with goodies!)
* no Koffice. man, I have to try that one :)
* based on glibc 2.0.7 for now
* ncurses 5.0 with no older versions... I feel it's a bit hasty, may
contrib packages out there will look for ver 3 or 4 of the libs.
* installation running along almost flawlessly (lesstiff-devel's RPM
seems broken), but I'll run home now, do benchmarks tommorow. anyone has
good benchmark test ideas to offer?
more on Bero, and Bero vs. RHL Starbuck tommorow.
--
Ira Abramov ; whois:IA58 ; www.scso.com ; all around Linux enthusiast
-- "Of course Unix is a user friendly OS,
it is just very picky about its friends..."