[geeks] Solaris 9/x86 Performance

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Tue, 14 Jan 2003, Chris Byrne wrote:

> Why such a problem with Red Hat? And does that problem also extend to
> Mandrake and other RedHatbased distributions?

RPM is fragile shit (I -don't- want another corrupted RPM database
nightmare), vendor A's RPMs aren't compatible with vendor
B's, and the dependency system is a trainwreck ("unresolved dependency:
foo-1.8.43.595-XYZ-47.2-gamma37").

If it uses RPM, it's dead in my book.  I guess I could always sneak
Slackware on the box, but once you get used to the ports tree and
nightly CVS upgrades to the latest "stable"[0], it's hard to use something
else.

> Is it the fact that they are actually trying to make money in a rational
> and possibly eventually sucessful way, or is it just their general
> cluelessness?

I have no problem with people making money.  The environment at work
consists of a lot of SMP POWER4 boxes from IBM running AIX, and some
decently big Sun hardware.  I'm not a free-software zealot.

> I've had the best experiences using BSD based OS's on my PPRO machines,
> but as you said, there are issues.

I might be able to stomach FreeBSD.  It just has its own little ways of
be only different enough to be a pain in the ass, after you've gotten
used to NetBSD and OpenBSD.

[0] Or "current", for the stuff I run at home.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke  *)  "everything i know about animals i learned from
Thorndale, TX      (*   ORA books."                  --alex j avriette