[Pc_Support] Generic Linux question ....

[William A. Mahaffey III]

Whaxiac Patrick wrote:

>On Sunday 11 December 2005 15:31, William A. Mahaffey III wrote:
>  
>
>>.... Several years back (late '90's) I had the impression that SuSE was
>>somewhat disdained by some geeks for their practice of making
>>alterations to kernel (& possibly other) code in their distro. I *think*
>>that most of the other 'big boys' (RH, Mandrake, maybe others) now do
>>this as well. They are mostly back-porting newer stuff from newer
>>kernels, as I understand it, but their kernels are nonetheless not
>>identical & possibly incompatible with other binary packages because of
>>these alterations. It is also considered unwise to try to use "vanilla"
>>kernels from kernel.org with these distros because of possible/likely
>>incompatibilities. Does anyone have a quick synopsis or a link on who
>>does what to their kernels, distro-by-distro ? TIA :-).
>>    
>>
>There are some 420 monitored, reviewed, OSes, at Distrowatch.
>Then, there are some 301 LiveCDs monitored, reviewed, at LiveCDlist.
>
>There are about 30 of them, that are proprietary to the state of what you 
>describe, AFAIK.  Some Proprietary versions that I have tried out: LinSpire, 
>Libranet, BearOps, Suse, Red Hat, Mandrake don't make the grade for my 
>personal preferences of what can be updated, upgraded, quickly and with 
>little conflict.
>
>In my many trials, since 1997, I have noted that the most problems I ever had 
>were with the proprietary distributions.  Too few inputs, single point of 
>control of the choices of the apps, and thus, the functionality.  
>
>But, I don't know of a standard or maintained, list of all the changes.  I try 
>to use OSes that accept the official kernel from kernel.org.  Tons less 
>headaches... and, I desire to never be 'locked-in' to some upgrade 
>subscription plan that enriches the coffers of a proprietor, while not 
>actually contributing a lot of money to the total effort by all the people.
>
>So, I have prchase a lot of retail boxed sets from all of the above, plus, 
>done direct donations to some contributers, my personal goal is to stay open 
>source, in it's true sense.  
>
>Hope that all gives you a bit of insight about part of the concept.    
>
>Proprietary vendors seems to do weirdness to give out some eye candy, to hype 
>and market their products, but, seem to have natural limits upon the number 
>of contributors (usually on the payroll- so, limited in number). whereas the 
>free distros seem to either be excellent, have many contributors, or, fail 
>due to lack of support.   
>
>Sort of a natural law of survival.   
>  
>

I *QUITE* agree w/ all of your observations. I am using SuSE at the 
moment (8.2 on a 933 MHz PIII, 9.2 on a 2.4 GHz P4) & like it OK, but 
have noticed problems w/ other packages not being available or not 
working unless specifically compiled for SuSE, thus the question. I knew 
about distrowatch, will look at livecdlist, thanks.

-- 
	William A. Mahaffey III
---------------------------------------------------------------------
	Remember, ignorance is bliss, but
	willful ignorance is LIBERALISM !!!!

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