Re: Current talk from gnomedesktop.org

[Daniel Farrell <daniel farrells org>]

On Fri, 2003-05-09 at 13:03, MArk Finlay wrote:
> > Well, I wasted a whole evening the other night trying out Redhat 9...  and
> > it was a aweful experience...  the GUI installer wouldn't work(probably my
> > Radeon 8500AIWDV video card)...  
> 
> It's possible to do a text based install which is not going to be harder
> than installing debian ;)

Yep, I used the text based installer.  Don't know what the problem is
though, RH8 installed fine when I tried it a while back.  And fyi,
debian's installer is much easier than red hat's text one...  but then
again, I'm familiar with it.

> > and I could only install a bare minimum
> > system off of only 1 CD(was too impatient to download and burn them
> > all)... 
> 
> Well you NEED at least the first two cds to install a working system so
> the fact that you only used one and ended up with a broken system
> doesn't really say anything against redhat ;)

I think it's silly that I need to download 1.2 Gig+ to burn CD's that I
need to update as soon as I install it.  I got a 50Meg Netinst Debian
image and installed over the network.

> >  then trying to build the system up from there was not fun...  and
> > finally after dealing with lots of dependency problems I just ditched it
> > and reinstalled Debian...
> 
> Well if you do a proper install from 2 cds and then install apt and
> synaptic and only use apt sources for rpms instead of random websites
> then you will have no rpm dependency problems. I have gstreamer,
> freshrpms, and "people's repositry" sources set up and have access to
> far more new and useful gnome software than any debian user :)
> 
> People compare apt to rpm but that makes no sense as rpm is a package
> format and apt is a distribution system. Apt is just as useful on a 
> redhat system as it is on debian - the main advantage of debian being
> the massive repositories - but if one is building a distro from scratch
> that is less important.
> 
> My plans totally revolve around apt - they just don't so much revolve
> around debian ;)

Yeah, I have used apt with rpms before.  I tried RH8 when it came out. 
Synaptic is an aweful UI...  need something better than that.  And there
are a ton of gnome debs out there...  I've got all the software I could
want in debs.

> > 
> > So, my vote is for building off of Debian... :-)
> > 
> 
> Hmm, well I still have to look at it but my impression is that there is
> a LOT more work involved in using debian. Also the gnome community is
> very much gnome-centric and all the other people who have volunteered to
> work on this use redhat.

Lot's of people have built off of Debian...  Lindows, Progeny, Libranet,
and Corel to name a few.  Must be doing something right.  But if your
people want to build off Red Hat, that's your deal.  I don't think I'm
game for that.  We can still share ideas for more upper level stuff.

> I mean debian still doesn't have a gui installer - and one of the main
> things that I want for the os is to have no necessity to use the cli.
> With the next redhat version it will be possible to install and boot
> without having to see a blinking cursor on a black background once!

Well, the gnome-os peeps were going to port PGI(Progeny's graphical
installer) to Gtk2...  That solves that.  As for hiding boot
messages...  have you never used LPP?

> I would also love to hear how you would plan on building off debian..

I'm tracking unstable...  and my plans would be to do some custom
patches on a few packages to get rid of stuff that isn't neccesary for
the desktop and get a nice base.  Then the rest is integration and
themes.  I'm gonna check to see if any work was ever done on PGI. 
Anyone listening on gnome-os know if anything was ever done?

I think that's all I got for now...

Dan