South African intro

[Lloyd De Jongh]

Hi all

I'm a South African sysadmin living in Dubai. I run RHEL/CENTOS on the server, however I am not a RH fan for personal use (RPM and dependencies is the major source of my pain).

I had tried PCLinuxOS, found it to be a great distro, but still RPM-based and a source of frustration despite the fact that it is so simple, mature and functional otherwise.

I was about to go with Ubuntu 7.04 on my laptop (My only issue with Ubuntu being I don't like Gnome, much prefer KDE, and would have switched. However I know XP well and prefer that even more, being clumsy at the Linux GUIs, but very comfortable at the command line), but I stumbled upon a mention of Pardus the same day. The next day it was running on my laptop and it is perhaps the best Linux experience I have had since I first discovered Slackware all those many years ago.

I have some questions to post in the forum (current ones centre around managing startup scripts from the command line), but I look forward to getting very comfortable with Pardus. I loved its package management. I installed literally in SECONDS what had taken me several hours of frustration over 4 days with RPM dependency issues just to get some simple software installed.

I was hooked from that point

On my HP laptop hardware support has been flawless. Connection to the net and LAN has been a breeze. Not a single hiccup yet.

Well done on a great Linux distribution. I'm sure your approach, methods and philosophy will soon find its way into other distributions.

Regards

Lloyd

[Willem]

Hi Lloyd,
first of all, welcome on our forum! Nice to have such an experienced user around 
I share your fustration on the RPM's let alone the hassle with .deb files. It surely took some guts for the people from Tubitak to write a package management from scratch. As they also  wrote their own init system, their own configuration manager.
Pardus is a wonderfull Linux distro which (to me at least) adds something special to the GNU system!

Again, welcome! Ask everything you want, maybe we cant answer everything, but we sure can give it a try!

[Lloyd De Jongh]

Hi Willem. Thank you for the welcome.

I have only heard good things about Debian, so I wasn't even aware that there are occasional issues with .deb files. I can see how it was a big step for the Pardus team to break from the norm and rewrite so many elements from scratch. So far, after only 3 or 4 days of experience I think they've done a great job of making a usable Linux system.

As a sysadmin we are essentially required to access our servers over the network via SSH, and the machines are booted into runlevel 3 (no GUI) anyway. Hence I prefer knowing the command line.

I use Windows XP as my desktop OS and on the major partition on my laptop (I refuse to move to Vista). I don't mind actually starting fresh with Pardus (as a novice to their new design of some of the internals) in that it's easier than confusing myself between Debian and RedHat configs. That is also a reason why I am open to Pardus. Again, I have only heard good things about Debian from colleagues and other sources.

Since this system works so smoothly it would be great to look at their upcoming (?) server OS. I would wonder if Mudur bypasses the need for traditional init, since even Solaris 10 hasn't completely done away with init. Before putting this OS on the server I would need to know the answer to some technical questions so I could run my machines reliably. I would consider putting it on one or two servers once I was comfortable with the necessary (command line) admin. Already so far my source installs are flawless.

I understand though that their main thrust right now is a usable desktop OS. They have contributed something good, and I can see it gaining more and more attention.

Lloyd

[Kavani]

Joededej!  Wow, I'm glad to see Pardus pawing its way around the globe.  Traveled little bugger.  I don't blame you on your decision not to switch to Vista.  This is a very polished distro and I've only have good things to say about it (even with the hiccups, now and again).

[Lloyd De Jongh]

Pardus has merit. I just have to get to grips with the technicalities with regards to console-based system admin, from a server point of view. I draw the line at coding, so I want admin to be painless without having to know Python like the back of my hand before I can add services and start/stop them from the command line.

I am sure the Pardus learning curve will be woth it though.