Roy J. Tellason, Sr. composed on 2015-08-13 11:58 (UTC-0400):
I've never looked at Gentoo, basically because
from what I've read it
appears that it would be *way* more time-consuming. In terms of other
It is more time consuming, waiting for compiles for every package installed.
But, you learn things you'd not likely ever learn otherwise, and the result
is you have more control and knowledge of your system, and a lot less
installed software that you'll never use.
choices, I picked Debian since an awful lot of what
else was out there
was derived from it. Now I'm not so sure of my choice. I *did* feel that
Debian's LTS nature can be a compelling reason for choosing it.
it was a good idea to get acquainted with some distro
that used a package
manager, so Debian seemed the logical choice.
My favorite package manager was the youngest around until Fedora 22 was
released, when Yum was replaced by DNF, making DNF the newest. I find
openSUSE's Zypper and YaST2 combination unbeatable in terms of power, ease of
use and friendliness. Zypper is cmdline only. YaST2 has ncurses and GUI
modes. Both use the same RPM foundation and databases, so they can freely be
switched between, just not both run at the same time. Their package locking
system is simple and easy to use yet as powerful as anyone could hope for.
...
> To by default stop init prior to X startup, do
> # systemctl set-default multi-user.default
I'll try that just before I'm ready to reboot
the system next. Mostly I
just leave it running...
It doesn't matter when. AFAICT, default.target has no effect on anything
already running.
> However, as with sysvinit, as with all rpm distros
with which I am
> familiar, all the above can be disregarded, and yet not have X
> automatically start, simply by including a 2 or a 3 on the kernel's
> cmdline in the bootloader stanza you use. Debian and its derivatives
> (e.g. *buntu) using sysvinit differed from rpm distros by including X
> autostart in runlevel 2 and not defining any additional startups in
> runlevels 3-5.
The bootloader is another issue. I'm used to
LILO, not GRUB. So I have
more to learn here, too.
Note that there is both the original Grub, now typically called Grub Legacy,
and Grub2, which some distros call Grub while others call it Grub2. The newer
is significantly different, much more powerful, and much tougher to deal with
manually if manually is your pleasure for configuration management. Grub
Legacy doesn't support EFI, can be tricky or impossible to use with storage
capacity >2TB, but doesn't cry the sky is falling when you wish to install it
to a partition instead of MBR, nor complain when a vga= is on cmdline. Grub
is my primary bootloader on every one of my many systems, always on a primary
partition, never the MBR. Grub2 here is only ever installed to Debian or its
derivatives, and not used to actually boot except when wanting to select a
prior kernel version to boot.
...
> In openSUSE, changing the system level default WM
session defined for
> the login manager has up to now at least been via
> /etc/sysconfig/windowmanager.
That file doesn't seem to exist here. There's
a /etc/sysctl.d directory,
and a /etc/systemd directory, a lot of stuff to sort through.
I don't think very many distros use /etc/sysconfig/ any more, if they ever
did. I do think on openSUSE it's used mostly or entirely by YaST2.
> Other distros control it someplace I never seem to
be able to locate.
That's one of the things that drives me nuts with
regard to this stuff.
Lots and lots of complications, and it's not apparent to me why they
changed things to be that way, what the advantage is.
It seems distros are more and more catching on that /etc/ is where sysadmin
deviation from default configs belong while defaults belong in /usr/ along
with the software.
...
--
"The wise are known for their understanding, and pleasant
words are persuasive." Proverbs 16:21 (New Living Translation)
Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks!
Felix Miata ***
http://fm.no-ip.com/