Date: Tue, 30 May 2000 13:33:47 -0700 From: David Johnson <djohnson@acuson.com> To: Thomas Good <tomg@mailhost.nrnet.org> Cc: outlawtx@bga.com, freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Some food for thought...(aka rant of the day) Message-ID: <393425AB.42CABC8E@acuson.com> References: <Pine.LNX.3.96.1000530142652.14686A-100000@mailhost.nrnet.org>
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Thomas Good wrote: > Basically the *only* difference between Linux distributions is system > initialisation. RedHat is very System V. So if you know UnixWare or > Solaris, RH is not *that* far off. Slackware is very BSD, in fact the > development teams know one another and share ideas. After all, Walnut > Creek is both their homes. SuSe and Debian are somewhere in the middle. I was meaning something a little different. Of course, underneath, all of the linuces are similar. However, over the top of that they all have a different veneer. For someone who doesn't know Unix inside and out, that veneer becomes important. They won't know each and every configuration file by heart. They won't know that Redhat stores foo.rc under /etc/foo while SuSE stores it under /etc/bar. So they'll do what the manual tells them to do, and fire up Linuxconf, or YaST, or COAS, or SAS, or whatever. This is the veneer, and it doesn't matter how much you know the Corel veneer, it won't do you any good for SuSE or Debian. And unlike typical open source software, these administration tools only work for the distro they're designed for. Proficiency in YaST is useless when you're faced with a Mandrake box. To the average Linux user, Debian is as different from Caldera as IRIX is from HPUX. A big advantage to FreeBSD and it's cousin Slackware, is that by and large the veneer has been stripped away. This makes them much more difficult to learn, but at least you're learning generic all-purpose Unix instead of locking yourselves into a single distro. David To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-newbies" in the body of the message
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