[ILUG] linux myths, random thoughts

From: kevin lyda (kevin at domain suberic.net)
Date: Wed 06 Oct 1999 - 19:33:19 IST


"John P . Looney" spoke thusly:
>[ntfs usage]

it's read-only afaik.

there are three jfs initiatives: sgi's xfs, tweedies ext2+journalling
(quite nifty), and some other one that i never hear about. the middle
one is nice because converting from ext2 to ext2+jfs is very simple,
and the partition is still mountable (ro) as a vanilla ext2.

it will be interesting to see if distributions begin to take advantage
of multiple file systems in installs. there's really no need for a jfs
in /usr (which can be mounted ro), and the root partition can usually
be small enough that you don't need large fs support.

one last note. i saw a redhat vs. mandrake thread, but didn't follow
it. it's probably come across that i like redhat more then other
distributions, but i'm not sure i've ever spelled out why.
overall i see redhat as a better system for the following
reasons:

   better platform support: they offer alpha and sparc versions in
       addition to intel. theoretically one could learn to admin redhat
       systems and not have much retraining to upgrade to bigger and
       beefier os's. there are unofficial mips and ppc ports or parts of
       ports also available and i really hope they get into supporting
       ppc officially. i've used non-intel chips and arches to know
       they are definitely not the best game in town.

   free software: everything they write is released gpl'ed. if i
       ever get really bored and decide to make a threaded intercal
       distribution i can just use redhat as a base. all their code is
       there. and as time has gone on they've used less and less non-free
       software - for instance ee took the place of xv in the 5.x series.

   rpm: it just makes things easier. i don't have a multiprocessor
       so building each package from scratch takes time away from doing
       real work.

no other unix, *bsd, or linux offering gives me those three things.
openbsd is the closest (well, netbsd, but i think they gave theo a raw
deal). so if people follow that criteria i think redhat is the obvious
choice. if you have different criteria (speed, ease of use, unixness,
stuff to play with, cutting edge, etc) i'm not that positive that redhat
comes out on top. since those aren't factors for me, i don't know
enough to judge them.

kevin



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.6 : Thu 06 Feb 2003 - 13:04:41 GMT