Introduction

[Ric Moore]

On Thu, 2011-03-03 at 14:18 +0100, Niki Kovacs wrote: 
> Le 02/03/2011 10:00, Ric Moore a écrit :
> > Another fugitive from the rpm world? Trust me, it was like getting a
> > divorce when I switched to Ubuntu from Red Hat / Fedora. I just couldn't
> > stand the pain any longer. I can't say I've looked back. Ric
> 
> No troll intended, but there's nothing wrong with RPM, and building DEB 
> packages can be as much a chore. I just finished a two-week training for 
> a series of sysadmins on RHEL/Oracle Linux, and one of my favourite 
> sports in the course is making the students use *only* RPM, only to 
> discover the benefits of Yum thereafter.
> 

I used yum like forever, back when. It has some nifty features. What I
was referring to was the pain incumbent on the user to get at 3rd party
repos in order to get the basic "forbidden" fruit needed to get your
machine to do things like Sun Java, nVidia drivers, mplayer audio /
video codecs and the like. There was an unofficial war amongst the 3rd
party Fedora repos to do things one way or another, and mixing between
them would break things right and left. I have no such heartbreak with
Ubuntu. I got to enjoy using my computer, instead of the distro using
me. 

Had Red Hat kept their generic $29 box-edition, as Bob Young provided
for the General Population, Ubuntu would have had a much worse time
getting off of the ground. Instead, they got handed an entire market
with both hands, by Red Hat. That, to me, was a terrible mistake. The
future admins will use what they are comfortable with, and the next
generation will belong to Ubuntu. Bob understood that and provided
Install Fests to colleges / universities and held the annual Red Hat
Expo for mainstream users, as well as developers. 

I was at Red Hat (1999-2000) when Oracle kept about 30 full time
developers at the Red Hat RTP location. We used it for our CRM system.
I, and just about everyone in the support section, loathed it, but it
has come a long ways since then, I'll admit. Heh, back then Google was
just a couple of guys that Bob knew and he encouraged us to use it for
search purposes in order to support their effort. I guess that one paid
off! 

That was what I meant that switching to Ubuntu was like getting a
divorce, after a LOT of history with rpm and getting to rub shoulders
with some of the earliest Linux giants within the rpm world. :) Ric


-- 
My father, Victor Moore (Vic) used to say:
"There are two Great Sins in the world...
..the Sin of Ignorance, and the Sin of Stupidity.
Only the former may be overcome." R.I.P. Dad.
Linux user# 44256