Re: Totally Off-Topic (it's that Linux newbie again)

>>>>> "Glen" == Glen A Stromquist <glen_stromquist_at_no.spam.yahoo.com> writes:

 Glen> With our new T1 connection here I have been downloading some of
 Glen> the other distro's to try as well, but thats a "spare-time"
 Glen> thing, not a lot of that around right now! I do want to try an
 Glen> Oracle install on a debian and a BSD flavour though. The
 Glen> dbaclick.com group has some pretty knowledgeable linux people
 Glen> there, and a nice forum layout if you care to have a look.

If you do development in various languages etc, Debian is great! Of all the distros I've tried, Debian has the best package management - especially if you have a fast connection. You just install a minimal distribution and then when you need something you just type

apt-get install package

The really nice thing is you don't get into the dependency spiral diving I use to sometimes get with RPM. If your into emacs, I've found Debian to have the best selection of emacs packages - and if you like lisp, scheme, perl, tcl/tk, c, c++, python etc - its got them all.

My only criticism of Debian is that it has one of the slowest release cycles. The current stable release 'woody' has only been out for about 5 months and its their first release with the 2.4.x kernel - most other distros like Red Hat have had a few releases since the 2.4.x kernel came out.

The Debian 'testing' release is pretty good - more current than the stable release and is in fact very stable. I'm currently running the bleeding edge unstable release at home and testing at work. The unstable release seems to be pretty stable so far (touch wood). I have Oracle running (8.1.7) on both systems - but it can be a bit tricky to get the libraries correct and I did the install while still running woody.

Tim

-- 
Tim Cross
The e-mail address on this message is FALSE (obviously!). My real e-mail is
to a company in Australia called rapttech and my login is tcross - if you 
really need to send mail, you should be able to work it out!