4 Dec
2005
4 Dec
'05
3:06 p.m.
On 12/3/05, Fernando Lopez-Lezcano <nando(a)ccrma.stanford.edu> wrote:
On Sat, 2005-12-03 at 17:28 -0800, Mark Knecht wrote:
Yeah, most probably you are correct, but it's my unfortunatel view of
the world of prepackaged distros. They work really well when I use
exactly what they provide. As soon as I go outside of that boundry
they get dodgy in my experience.
On 12/3/05, Brian Dunn
<job17and9(a)yahoo.com> wrote:
Hmmmm, I'd dare say this is a bit extreme :-) So does anybody out there have the best of all
worlds?
good free documentation, reliable hardware support,
binary packaging, a fast audio kernel, and config
files that don't get re-written by some user friendly
script somewhere that would be oh so convinient except
for the whole doesn't work thing?
If your system works the way you want it too most of
the time, i want to hear your opinion.
gratefull,
Brian
I have two opinions:
1) If I want *exactly* what Fernando provides on the Planet site, no
more and no less, then PlanetCCRMA is the best I know of. It's well
supported in the audio area by a great guy. It has a good mailing list
with helpful people. (Of which I hope I'm one once in awhile anyway.)
Overall very positive, but it has two downsides:
a) If you need ANYTHING that's not part of the Planet apt system then
be prepared for RPM hell. At least that's my experience. Email, DVD
stuff, etc.
I'm not saying this is easy, of course.
I'm not saying that it is better or greater than other distros, either.
I'm not saying that I can be objective :-) ;-) :-p
As objective as anyone about distro religion and you have 100x more
rights to speak you mind based on the work you've done.
The ammount of work depends on what "anything" is. Anything that is in
Fedora Core should be easy (includes email I guess).
Yes, there are many good solutions for email clients. I should not
have included this.
Anything in other
apt/yum repositories is usually fine.
This is where I ran into many problems and eventually got put off.
If you want to build your own
packages from source you will need to install the required development
packages and maybe that is what you mean by "RPM hell[*]", but I imagine
that should be the case in other distros as well - unless they don't
make a separation between base and developer packages, perhaps that's
the case with gentoo. You may run into stumbling blocks if whatever you
are trying to build depends on newer versions of core packages than the
ones provided by the base distro, that can of course be a problem.
That is the problem I ran into many times. I got started with some app
on Gentoo and built, for instance, Aqualung. The Aqualung guys used
whatever library they wanted to use, and I had no problem finding it
on Gentoo. Aqualung worked. Then I wanted to build it on FC and found
that the library didn't exist. You would look into installing some
RPM, but maybe it didn't come from the same depository I was getting
everything else. I start changing apt setup files to get stuff, then
forget I've made changes, then download stuff the next day that maybe
I shouldn't have downloaded and after a few weeks somethign gets
flakey.
Clearly this sort of experience is driven by my lack of structure and
background in properly administering a Linux machine. I'm sure that FC
works well for folks who know what they are doing. (I'm not part of
that group.) That said, I still have one FC2/Planet machine here. It's
working quite well and probably will for years to come if I don't
change things.
YMMV...
-- Fernando
[*] usually "RPM Hell" was meant to describe the situation in which you
want to install an isolated package (an RPM in the case of rpm based
distros), and it requires another package you don't have, and after
finding it it requires another, and so on and so forth. This particular
situation is old history, these days you can use dependency resolvers
such as apt, yum or smart to resolve dependencies automatically for
you.
yep.