Kirill Ponazdyr <no@spam.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 18 Sep 2003 22:44:00 +0200, Emmanuel Florac
> <eflorac@imaginet.fr> wrote:

>>Old legend. Stupid windows newbies complain hoooow Linux is difficult and
>>arcane. However, for a skilled unix administrator it's a breeze. Current
>>distributions install in less than an hour and just work. They recognize
>>out of the box SCSI cards, Fibre Channel cards, Giga Ethernet cards, RAID
>>cards and autoconfigure everything. Linux is WAY EASIER to install than
>>Solaris, IRIX or whatver Unix you like.

> This is a double edged sword. The more automated and "Boxed" the OS
> is, the more PITA it becomes to adjust it to your needs and undestrand
> it.

I had no problems with Linux in this area. The process of adjustment
and customization is not much different from Solaris.

> A "skilled unix administrator" must understand the systems under his
> controll in and out and my general expierence was/is that it is easier
> to do a plain barebone OS install and then expand it with inhouse
> packages than to try and understand webs of dependencies, configs and
> links on PnP systems.

This is a trivial thing to do on many Linux systems, RedHat or Debian
in particular. You can start with a fairly minimal system and then
continue building it from there. Thanks to tools like apt-get or
up2date it is easy to add just the packages and their dependencies on
top of a basic system. I am not sure what you mean by the web of
dependencies, etc. The dependecies (I assume you mean the package
dependencies) exist on Solaris and other operating systems too. Even
without up2date or similar tool, I still don't find the package
dependencies to get on my way. I find that the packages produced by
RedHat and Debian teams are generally done well. Rarely I have been
wanting to replace something that they already package with an inhouse
package, something I can't say about many of Solaris packages.


-akop