Subject: Re: Workstation vs Professional?
From: civileme (civileme@mandrakesoft.com)
Date: Sun Dec 02 2001 - 18:33:33 AKST
On Sunday 02 December 2001 02:37 am, D Brown wrote:
> I am a linux newbie/wannabe and I got into a long discussion with a buddy=
> of
> mine as to whether a boxed version of, for example, Suse Professional 7.3=
> is
> worth the extra dollars when everything that is really needed is in the b=
> oxed
> workstation flavor. Any comments would be greatly appreciated.
>
> D. Brown
>
Depends what you use it for and how much you know and how willing you are to
spend time setting things up. Thos os the same for all distributions, except
with SuSE what you want may not be availaible via download because there are
significant closed-source codings on the distro.
If you check Mandrake, you will find none except on commercial CDs and
specifically made demos even then or proprietary drivers that we cannot
include in the free version. It is a matter of convenience in Mandrake to
buy the box or one of the advanced boxes, because anyone with moderate to
advanced skill can duplicate what we offer with a week to two weeks work
hunting things on the internet and customizing for our distribution.
Just as an example-- the XBasic compiler which is a Windows and X compatible
drag-n-drop development environment with a compiler powerful enough to be
written in itself. It has an rpm on one of the commercial CDs in Mandrake
8.1 because it did not arrive in time for someone to rewrite it for the
overcrowded three CDs of the free disttro. It took 36 solid hours of work to
unravel their makefile which directly made rpm 3.0 type rpms for RH, Windows
exe files, and binary tarballs from the same source tarball, and to build a
source rpm4 style srpm and binary rpm. It had to be installed to do the SRPM
(really interesting when you get a
BuildRequires %package-%version
)
Anyway, XBasic is a free package and it was a lot of hassle making it fit the
rest of the distro. Professional or ProSuite editions sometimes include
unlockable demos of commercial apps which you would play a nightmare to get
working otherwise, like the very kernel-version-sensitive Win4Lin and VMWare
packages. So you choose a convenience/time/work tradeoff for price. Linux
distributions survive because most folks view money as a renewable resource
and time as non-renewable.
Civileme
> ____________________________________________________________________
> Get free e-mail and a permanent address at http://www.amexmail.com/?A=3D1=
This archive was generated by hypermail 2a23 : Sun Dec 02 2001 - 18:29:09 AKST