[Asterisk-Users] Redhat vs Mandrake.

[Steven Critchfield]

On Thu, 2003-04-17 at 14:00, Francisco Perez-Landaeta wrote:
> Hi, I am a newbie to asterisk.
> 
> I am considering getting linux to test with asterisks but would like to know
> which version of linux is best Redhat or Mandrake. Can someone guide to make
> the right decission. I have also heard of lindows. But, then again your
> feedback is appreciated.
> 
> I intend to try out the Linejack,  phonejack and the digium board.  I
> currently have the linejacks and phonejacks but not the digium. I have been
> following this list and seen that many people dont like the linejack.

Please understand anything I write below is not a flame, attack, or
meant duragoatory. I also don't want to feed a distro war since we have
one in the archives to be looked back upon.

I don't think anyone here doesn't like the linejacks or phone jacks, it
is just that they aren't as well supported as other hardware. 

As for the distro question....
If you have knowledge of unix systems or linux, you should be far enough
along to make your own decisions. If you aren't that far along, Redhat
and Mandrake are shooting for the desktop market, and Redhat has a
seperate section shooting at servers. Both are really aimimg at windows
converts. In shooting for those markets, both have a tendency to
insulate the user from what is going on. This becomes a problem when you
need to know how to dig in and solve problems. With as much as I
personally dislike both of them, I tend to recomend them to a user who
is just coming out of the windows world, but I caveat it with a comment
regarding them as stepping stones to more powerful systems.

The biggest piece to know about all distros is that they are nothing
more than a collection of tools wrapped around the linux kernel. Some do
modifications to the kernel also. So anysoftware that runs on one distro
should run on another.

Now for a short list of the compaints. Redhat and Mandrake are comercial
companies. They need to make money, and the only way to compete in a
distro marketplace with free software is to always be up to date. Please
understand I do not have a grudge against a company making money off of
open source software, nor do I fault what they are doing. The downside
of their corporate needs is that they have to package the product and
get it ready to go sit on a shelf somewhere. In doing this they commit
to a certain amount of time where the distro is frozen and is having
packaging made, CDs pressed, and then assembly and shipping time. All of
those actions put the CD availablility about 3 months after freeze. In
the open source world this is an eternity. So both RH and Mandrake try
to hedge their bets a bit on certain software by including pre release
software from groups that tend to produce solid work and whose
prereleases can be considered worthy of using. The problem is that when
they do this, it sometimes can come at a point where the software is in
change or about to change. RH is guilty of GCC prereleases that have
caused problems. RH also has included patches to the kernel that make
the kernel less than good occasionaly. The last one I'm still fighting
with on 2 machines that I _HAD_ to use the RH kernel for.

Okay, now that I've stated both the good and bad of RH and Mandrake,
Please note that there are many other distrobutions available on the
net. My favorite is debian. There is also Slackware, one of my first
linux distrobutions I used after converting from netbsd in the mid '90s.
I've heard some people say good things about Gentoo if you are willing
to run a freebsd like machine where you compile from source just about
everything. 

Please note that one side effect of choosing a distrobution is that you
will then have to deal with whatever support groups you have around
linux generally, or your choosen distrobution specifically. I can almost
always get onto IRC and get a question answered about debian. I'm sure
you can do similarly with other distrobutions, I just have not had the
need.


wheeew, I think I worded that such as to avoid fanning the beginings of
a flame war.   
-- 
Steven Critchfield  <critch at basesys.com>