die bohne der nacht ([info]nixietube) wrote,
@ 2005-08-02 15:44:00
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penguin attack!
I think I'd like to install LINUX, and it seems that Red Hat went commercial. Anyone have any suggestions of a good flavor to install? I'm considering Red Hat 9.0 (pre-commercial), Fedora, or debian.

I'd like one that lets me compile linux source straight from the tarball (no porting!). The next primary features that I'd like are stability and security. Last comes an easy, non-windoze-destroying install and the ability to read/write NTFS file systems (am I asking for too much here?).

I plan to do some wireless things with my new LINUX box. Anyone ever play with one of those range extender antennae? Do they work well? Here's the one I'm eyeballing:

Hawking HAT15SC

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buy a real OS, hippy
[info]lupoleboucher
2005-08-02 11:42 pm UTC (link)
RHL has been totally useless since 7.3 -think not to do it.

Slackware seems to have what you are looking for, Re: tarballs and such. I was suprised at how current and functional it was, even back in 7.2 RHL days.

Last I heard (about a year ago) Fedora was unusable. A hedge fund I interviewed at wanted me to unf8x0r their bleeding edge fedora installs. I laughed and laughed. They wouldn't even boot. No, I said, I want to be a quant: I want someone else to make sure the damned OS I run my models on isn't f8X0red. But the dumb ivy league prick would not listen to my suggestions. Simple suggestions like, do not use bleeding edge distros, and do not fire the sysadmin until he unf8x0rs your machines, just to prove to yourself what a big lasagnia you are when he "screws up" by listening to his 'superior.' I was also not impressed with his princeton bachelors degree and the fact that he knew rich guys to contribute to his hedge fund. It is amazing how these little masters of the universe want you to kiss their butts.

Why don't you use a real OS, like one of the BSD's? GNU anything is bound to suck donkey balls.

By the way, I was going to tell you to buy a Mac, but then I remembered OS-X sucks bigger donkey balls than Windows-2000 does in almost every way. OS-X does seem to be more secure: I will give it that, but it is otherwise pretty much worthless.

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Re: buy a real OS, hippy
[info]nixietube
2005-08-11 07:11 pm UTC (link)
I'd love to install a BSD, but then I'd have to port the code. Practically everyone writes for LINUX, and half of them don't bother to port their code to something else. I want to use some specialized code to do networking junk, and I'm pretty sure that I'd have to do a pretty hefty porting job if I installed a BSD.

By the way, I am going to buy a Mac, perhaps sometime this year. I just love the FreeBSD backend. I want the security mostly. I also want the 14" version for ultra-portability.

Thanks for the slackware tip, I'll take a look into it.

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[info]ghosthacked
2005-08-03 03:44 am UTC (link)
1. linux source straight from the tarball, what do yo umean, recomping the kernel in /usr/src/linux and then moving the kernel image to / by hand, such that you don't need a pkg manager for it? It's fairly easy to use debian's kernel-pkger

2. stability and security? It's better than windows (tm). Debian stable is very stable and the apt-get has the security update site in there.

3. writing NTFS i thought was still experimental. reading is no sweat. non windoze destroying install is ez if you already have a 2nd partition. If not, well the hard part is playing with partition magic.

Red hat 9.0 was really really slow for me.

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[info]nixietube
2005-08-11 07:19 pm UTC (link)
1. Nothing so complicated. I want to do a "tar xvf code.tar", then run "make" and that's it. No missing library errors. No changing the code to match BSD functions. In other words, no porting! The code packages that I'm interested in are LINUX only. I'm not really interested in recompiling kernels nowadays (tho admittedly it does make the machine boot and sometimes run faster).

2. Practically everything's more secure than windoze. :>

3. Probably reading NTFS is good enough for now. Looks like debian stable might be the way to go. I'll have to do some partitioning "magic" no matter what I install, unfortunately.

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[info]ghosthacked
2005-08-11 10:52 pm UTC (link)
the code pkgs you want - do they currently run on redhat? Debian stable has the problem of being "old" by default. Which means if you're needing bleeding edge libs you're going to have to get em or install them somehow. Which is a little pain. HOWEVER- if you are running stuff that isn't bleeding edge (which for me seems to be not gnome-gtk-kde-moz-gui-oriented) then getting the libraries are simple just apt-cache search for the foo library and apt-get install libfoo-dev (for the header files).

From what I can tell the tradeoff between debian and redhat is ease maintain-ablility vs. newness of libs. Also redhat tends to chug more since more stuff is installed by default, whereas in debian, hell, even traceroute isn't installed by default.

Cheers.

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