[LUNI] Microsoft loses 10,000 (so far) in Extremadura, Spain

[Larry Garfield]

Andrew Morrison wrote:

> Of course, you are completely correct.  This is still the case, although
> I personally rarely run into a problem.  There are, of course, technical
> solutions to the problem you bring up which I will not mention here.  
> 
> What I was referring to by "user" was the average-mom type who wants to
> install/upgrade/remove software without touching the command line.  I
> still contend that Red Carpet fills this bill as it is unlikely that the
> average user will desire SSL to email/surf/wordprocess/play solitaire.
> In this case, these users *will* "just stick with the Red Carpet
> releases".

I've not used Red Hat in a few years, but Mandrake 9's urpmi (pronounced 
erp-me as far as I'm concerned, and no one will tell me otherwise!) is 
really quite nice.  It's essentially the same type of setup and 
dependency checks as apt-get, except that it does have a complete set of 
graphical front ends so that you don't need to touch the command line if 
you don't want to (although full command line tools are there as well). 
  The main catch is the archive.   The "core" archive is the Mandrake 
download edition CDs, so rather than getting packages from the network 
you are swapping CDs.  The Mandrake Contrib archive has several more 
gigs of programs, some of them frankly essential (eg, nano),  but the 
total archive is still substantially smaller than the Debian archive. 
The Contribs packages also are not managed by MandrakeSoft, so they are 
usually gpg unsigned.  I've yet to have a program in the Contribs that 
broke something, however.  And the whole system, at least with the 
Contribs server I'm using, feels much slower than apt-get.  It's still 
getting very close for an RPM-based system, however.

-- 
Larry Garfield			AIM: LOLG42
lgarfiel at students.depaul.edu	ICQ: 6817012

-- "If at first you don't succeed, skydiving isn't for you." :-)