[Asterisk-Users] Redhat vs Mandrake.

[William Walsh]

I just knew when I started reading this it was going to be a pro-debian
post.

It's one thing about debian users that really annoys me....

On Thu, 2003-04-17 at 12:43, Steven Critchfield wrote:
> 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.   
-- 
William Walsh <william at wxw.org>
Jabber: william at wxw.biz