Re: [MLUG] SuSE

[Stephen Montgomery-Smith <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

Let me join the distribution war.

I am mostly a user of FreeBSD.  A while back I obtained a laptop, and at that 
time X didn't work with its video card.  There was a hack for X to make it work 
with this video card, but it only worked with Linux.

So I tried out SUSE.  I found it frustrating.  The problem was, if I wanted to 
change the configuration in some way, it pretty much had to be done using the 
GUI.  This meant searching through a bunch of clickable options, which took a 
long time to find.  There were also some configuration files that one could edit 
using ones favorite editor (vi for me), but the problem was that some 
configuration files would generate other configuration files, and so you had to 
work rather hard to make sure that your configuration change wasn't wiped out at 
some later stage.

Another problem is that the configuration files seemed to be all over the place. 
  Thus if I wanted to back up the system - that is, not back it all up, but just 
that which is necessary to restore in the case of a crash - well I never did 
figure it out.

With FreeBSD, all the configuration files are changed using vi.  (Well, there is 
a very primative curses based GUI program called sysinstall, but all it does is 
add entries to the configuration files.)  For this reason, the configuration 
files tend to be well designed and easy to edit.  Furthermore, these files tend 
to be in fairly well defined places, and so it is easy to figure out what needs 
to be backed up.  Also, when configuration files are changed using vi, if you 
want to make a change but are not sure about it, you can keep the original 
configuration in the file as a comment - indeed in general you can add comments 
to your configuration files so that you can remind youself later on why you did 
something.

Now I have to say that I have spent a lot of time with FreeBSD, and not so much 
time with Suse, and familiarity in this case definitely helps.  But when XFree86 
version 4 came out supporting my video card, it was a big relief for me.




-- 
Stephen Montgomery-Smith
EMAIL:PROTECTED
http://www.math.missouri.edu/~stephen

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