[rescue] Re: G5 case

[Eric Dittman]

> > personally, they would all be collecting much dust
> > without the "userland from a few hundred different
> > sources" SGI freeware.
> 
> That4s a bit different.  mkfs, your core utilities (such as ls, dd, and
> so on), your X11 distribution, and your core runtime libraries all come
> from SGI.  On Linux, the kernel team -only- works on the kernel.  The
> C runtime comes from GNU, the X11 distribution comes from XFree, the
> init system comes from I have no idea whom.

The init system comes from the GNU utils, like almost
all the other standard utilities.

> Even in the case of the BSDs, which use a lot of GNU software, the code
> is continually "BSDified" by the maintainer of whichever OS you're
> using.  OpenBSD, for example has made a lot of extensions to GCC to
> support their new "W^X" security model and other OS niftiness.

And RedHat "RedHatifies", SuSE "SuSEifies", Mandrake
"Mandrakeifies", and Debian just adds more stuff to
unstable.  There's no difference at all.

> Me, neither.  Note that I never said Linux doesn't work well.  It just
> isn't as polished and seamless as what I'm used to.  Using IRIX,
> Solaris, or one of the BSDs is like reading a large tome written by one
> author.  Using a Linux distribution is like reading a collection of
> short stories; while the underlying theme may be the same, it's clearly
> not one contiguous work.

I find RedHat to be very polished and seamless.  It also
has a much better installation process compared to either
NetBSD or OpenBSD (I haven't looked at FreeBSD for a
while).  With RedHat I can fine tune what is installed
during the installation process if I want, or I can
select sets that have the commonly-used packages already
included.  With NetBSD and OpenBSD I got the feeling of
"PLOP!" as each set was installed.  After that, there
was a lot of going out and grabbing what I needed and
installing it, rather than getting the chance to specify
everything I wanted and then walking away and letting
the installer go with it.

In that sense RedHat felt much more integrated and
seamless.
-- 
Eric Dittman
dittman at dittman.net