[Tfug] distro suggestions

[Ammon Lauritzen]

On Sat, Oct 30, 2010 at 8:49 PM, Phil Simpson <pgsimpso at gmail.com> wrote:
> Check out Arch.  It comes with the version of Ruby you want in the official
> packages and it somewhat like Gentoo sans having to compile everything.  I
> started using Arch for everything about a year ago and haven't regretted
> it.  Arch also has a really good community.

I'll give it a look, thanks.

On Sat, Oct 30, 2010 at 11:19 PM, John Gruenenfelder
<johng at as.arizona.edu> wrote:
> I can't speak to the usability of current firewall config tools.  Nowadays, I
> configure all that on my router running OpenWRT.  However, the last time I had
> to do it in Debian it was about, oh, five years ago or so.  I remember it
> being rather easy to configure.  But... that was a while ago.

Yeah, I use dd-wrt on an old wrt54g right now and have some Cisco
hardware if I really need it. Mostly, I'm curious for better options -
largely just because if I'm going to be running this box, I may as
well get some more use out of it ;)

> I personally run Sid at home.  I find breakage to be very rare, and since I
> know what's what with Debian, if there *is* breakage, I can usually fix it
> very quickly.
>
> At work I have a file server running stable and it is *very* stable.
> Definitely not bleeding edge, or anything, but there hasn't been a peep from
> it.  On my office machine I run testing so I can get newer software.  I'd run
> Sid on it, but other people use it on occasion and I don't want anything to
> break.

Yeah, honestly, I think Sid is usually plenty stable, but calling it
the unstable branch always unnerved me whenever I found something that
hadn't made its way to testing yet.

> Regarding OpenSSL, are you sure it's truly three years old?  It may be one of
> those Debian-special packages that seems old from the version number, but has
> a zillion patches applied to it.  Of course, that can backfire sometimes too
> (cough, OpenSSH)...

It could be a weird special patched build, but I don't trust them - I
always assume the worst when it comes to reported version numbers.
Especially when it comes to security. If you're not running an
official build, you should change the reported version string to
indicate this. Shrug.

I think I'll see if Arch isn't too low level for my needs and will
plan on Debian otherwise.

One thing I'm wanting to avoid here is having to learn a whole other language ;)

-- 
Ammon Lauritzen