Viraj's Weblog

I've been pretty much a die hard Red Hat Linux guy, so much that I even have an RHCE, which unfortunately will expire soon. Red Hat has always been a solid distribution on the corporate environment. Nowadays, because of Red Hat's cost, I usually use Whitebox Linux.

I experimented with Debian in the past and loved its package management. I recently installed Debian Testing on my home system. I still do not feel Debian is good for new users. Configuring X is something I had to do manually, and only could have because of past experience. Also, my sound does not work, and I haven't even begun to look into that.

I think Debian is great for servers. I've been learning Python and the book I'm reading has a chapter on mod_python. Well I figure'd I would try out Apache and mod_python on my Debian box. I could not believe how simple this was to install. Synaptic is a great GUI package management tool that is simple and works. So I looked for mod_python, and had a good selection of versions to use. Some work with Apache v1, v2, Python 2.2, 2.3, etc. I just selected the one I wanted, and then since I didn't have Apache, it was selected as a dependency and installed/downloaded flawlessly. What was very cool is when I looked at the /etc/apache2 directory for how the server is configured I saw a very elegant directory structure with the sysadmin in mind. You will have to check it out for yourself to appreciate it. The Debian packages are of very high quality. In all, it took me about 10 minutes.

Doing the above on a Red Hat system ends up with dependency hell, with RPMs not playing well with each other. I am constantly impressed with how well Debian packages the software, and I think I have found a new distribution for servers I setup. For workstations however, there is some ways to go for proper auto-detection of hardware.