Re: diff between RedHat and us

[JF Martinez <jfm2@club-internet.fr>]

> 
> Hi,
> 
> could anybody tell me what the differences are between a generic RedHat
> 6.0 distribution, and ours? And if those differences aren't all
> overruled by RH 6.1?
> 

Look at the 'differentials' subdirectory.  They are not overrruled:
Indy ahs software who is not in RedHat and some software who is common
to both is pacakeged differentaly in Indy.

Rh 6.1 has a a better installer but IMHO the Indy application choice
is better.


> I finally got the 6.0 CD-ROM and all I can say is that it is quite a
> difference with my old Debian. All the setup tools that I missed so much
> are there now, e.g. it took me no time to configure my Samba printer.
> 

Indy 6.1 will have a still better Samab configurator

> OTOH I was kind of disappointed by the fact that it took me 4/ 5
> installs to get RedHat working (because the installer autostarted some
> daemons that weren't even installed so that Init flipped), and I was

This is not normal because the init system will not even see and thuis
try to start daemons who are not installed.  My guess is that you were
you short on disk space so part of the servers were not installed: 6.0
did not check for disk space.  6.1 does.

> never prompted to make a normal user (and am still not sure how to do it
> best in RH, and why my "home" dir contains dirs as "samba" and "httpd" -
> that was different and more logical in Debian), I can use Netscape as
> root, etc. 
> 

Where does Debain place the Smaba and httpd directories?  FHS borbids
/usr for those purposes.


> Anyway, I am delighted about the linuxconf initiative, although it still
> doesn't quite follow all the Rules for a Good GUI. The RedHat installer
> is also nice but not directly entirely comprehensive.
> 

But whatr is worse some modules are far too tecnical

> Anyway, I wonder what's left behind for us to do that RedHat and Co
> (Corel) will not do themselves quite soon. Wonder if we not just "carry
> water to the sea".
> 

Many things.  What is the problem with Redhat?  Look at the people
they try to hire: you must have a degree in computer science or
mathematics/physics to apply.  That means University UNIX in all of
its horror.  They don't even think that somewhere in the world there
are people learning alone so the steep learning curve of traditional
Unix utilities make them unadequate, they don't even think that
somewhere in the world there are people who are home users and that
they need more attention paid to dial up networking or software for
managing a check book, they don't even think that Linux could be a
workstation for office applications instead of Windows, they don't
even think in the three person company where it is not possible to
have an employee studying system administration full time like
required by software like sendmail.  Their vision is restricted to
traditional Unix and they don't see that a free system can reach
people who were beyond Unix borders

That is why I think there is a strong need for a distribution being
the distribution of the users and specially of those people who are
outside Unix realm.

For a concrete example Indy preconfigures Samba for it using Linpopup
when the user gets a message from an NT (or Samba) server telling that
the printing job is finished: for RedHat people Linux can only be a
server so this is not needed, for Indy people the user could be using
opencascade (CAD), WordPerfect, Houdini (high end graphics) and because
some people around him are using Windows he has to print using Windows
protocols.


> I know this is discussed before (but back then I assumed that the diff
> between Debian and RedHat wasn't THAT great). I know that this could be
> endless. If you are afraid that you would KEEP answering this question,
> then add it to the FAQ.
> 

Pity I am barely able to cope.  What about someone alse adding this to
the FAQ?  (after giving it a more diplomatic tone of course)


> Greets,
> 
> Stefan
>