OT: What's the deal with Ubuntu?

[Les Mikesell]

On Mon, 2005-05-23 at 07:33, John Summerfied wrote:
> > 
> > Ubuntu started with debian packages - I'd argue that Fedora is a
> > better starting point.
> 
> Debian beats Fedora here. There are 13,000 or so packages already built 
> for Debian.

Maybe 'beats' in a different context. The discussion was about picking
a set for the first CD that would be a useful install for a lot of
users or at least get it down to where you would only need to use
yum/apt/up2date to pull another program or two from the repositories.
Having more packages may not help with this.

If you don't like sendmail & postfix, then maybe exim is to your taste? 
> Or even zmailer?.
> 
> Want a light-weight desktop? fvwm is there. Dillo for a featherweight 
> browser. links (the real one), w3m....

Most of the same stuff is rpm-packaged in third-party repositiories.

> > Moving, not removing.  The idea is to re-arrange things so most
> > installs only need one CD, but all the other packages are still
> > available.  Rather than argue over what should be on that one
> 
> Debian does this already, supporting my contention Debian's a better 
> base the Fedora Core.

If you can figure out the Debian release policy (or lack thereof) and
find the versions you actually want to run...  Ubuntu appears to be
the first ray of hope for this.

> As one who's been maintaining RHL since 3.0.3 and Debian since the death 
> of RHL was announced, I will assert I regard Debian's package-management 
> tools are better.
> 
> It's not dpkg vs rpm - they provide roughly equivalent functionality, 
> but Debian's apt-get vs yum and up2date.

Having failed several times to get dpkg to install a working system,
I have to disagree (but I haven't tried recently).

> Anything I can do with yum or up2date I can also do with apt-get, but 
> apt-get does more that I find useful.

Can you be more specific?  Is there something missing from the
apt-for-rpm port that seems to do approximately the same as yum?

-- 
  Les Mikesell
    les at futuresource.com