[plug] Re: Illiteracy on the list. Illisteracy? *PLUS* Mandrake, DebIan

[Leon Brooks]

Bret Busby wrote:
>> IMPORTANT: IF YOU ARE NOT CONTRIBUTING EDITED INFORMATION TOWARDS A
>> WALL POSTER, PLEASE DELETE THIS PARAGRAPH PLUS THE
>> ---XXX-POSTER-INFO--- TAGS BELOW AND EVERYTHING BETWEEN THEM FROM
>> YOUR REPLY *** NOW ***!

>> Edit the information and re-post it.  Leave the ---XXX-POSTER-INFO---
>> tags here for ease of later parsing.

>> ===START-POSTER-INFO=== ie, <flame mode=on valve="100%">

>> whoever-else: add your contribution here. Leave the
>> ---XXX-POSTER-INFO--- tags here for ease of later parsing.

>> ===END-POSTER-INFO===

> With the wording of the above, I am not sure what to leave, and, what to
> snip, to reduce unnecessary data transfer.

If I'd made it any clearer, I'd have had to put tape across to stop people from
walking into it. If you're contributing information to a wall poster, leave the
START and END POSTER INFO tags in, otherwise DELETE THEM. This way, someone
putting information together need only search their mailbox (or the archives)
for those tags.

However, since the only people who have replied up to and including this message
have either totally ignored the message (at the top, IN CAPS, starting
"IMPORTANT:") or simply passed cutesy comments and quoted the entire damn thing
then hardly deigned to refer to it, why, go ahead, do as you please.

> Could someone please clarify that for me?

Sorry, I don't have that much aluminium hydroxide. Sufficient quantities may not
exist.

> Also, regarding Mandrake, and the "derived from Red Hat"; a while ago,
> when I contacted Mandrake, regarding version 7, after it had just been
> released, and its relationship with a Red Hat version, I got a very
> arrogant response from mandrake, to the effect that Mandrake had no
> relationsip to any Red Hat distribution, and that Mandrake 7 was totally
> unrelated to any Red Hat distribution. My query had been simple; from
> memory, it was something likethis; from my understanding, Mandrake 6.0
> had been based on RH 5.2 (I think it was - the version was published on
> the Mandrake box, from memory), and I was simply asking which RH
> version, Mandrake 7 was based on.

The answer is "no."

Mandrake 5.0 was based on RedHat 5.0. All subsequent Mandrake distributions have
descended from that. Re-engineering a RedHat distribution was done *once* at the
very beginning, and never since. I can just about imagine how you phrased the
question, and the "snooty" response would be because ever since day release 5.1,
about three years ago, Mandrake has not been based on any redHat distribution.

> I understand that RH cannot be upgraded from a first digit version
> number to a later first digit version number (eg, upgrading my RH 5.2 to
> RH 6.2); that it has to be done as a clean instal, but, that with
> Debian, it can be done, easily and simply.

I don't know about "easily" -or- "simply" but DebIan's dependency resolution is
well above average. Any distro can be brought up to date by progressive
upgrades, it's just gruelling and RedHat haven't bothered to do it. I generally
keep the /home and /var (and sometimes /usr/local) partitions, back up /etc,
wipe the rest and install over the top. If you've been 0wn3d without knowing it,
you aren't any more. Neither is their any "cruft" hanging around that the
installer missed.

> I note that the references to the distributions, do not include Caldera

Or the LRP. The purpose of the posting was to be a seed, not a harvest (-:
wouldn't want to compete with Michael de Santis :-)

> Also, one distribution (I
> can't remember which, it may have been a Corel version), was supposed to
> provide options of desktops, so that a appearance could be chosen, like
> OS2, MacOS, Win 9x/NT4, Win 3.x/NT3.x, and, one or two others.

Most distributions do all of these and more. I've lost count of the number of
window managers available in Mandrake 7.1, for example, and most of these have
at least a dozen themes.

-- 
How penguins survive: many are cold, but few are frozen.