Once again, it's been a while since I've written. Work has been spectacular, and I'm continually amazed at how much God is blessing our business. Not that it's been quiet on the work front; quite the contrary, we've been working our butts off.
I'm celebrating our ongoing success this evening with a couple of yummy beers. One is a staple: Flying Dog Scottish Porter. Flying Dog is a Denver brewery that makes a great line of beers, and the Scottish Porter is not only delicious, but readily available even out here in the boonies. Not to mention that porter is generally my favorite brew... more refreshing than stout, yet more substantial than most ales.
Speaking of stout, the second beer I got was a Samuel Smith Oatmeal Stout. At $3.50/pint it isn't cheap, but I no longer wonder why it's so highly regarded in the beer community. Oatmeal stouts are particularly good, IMO, and this is the best of the bunch, at least in my limited experience (Barney Flats and maybe a couple of others). As just about any stout, it had little hoppiness, which is okay by me. But it wasn't overly malty either with that assault on the senses that some stouts provide. It was like drinking a cup of Starbucks after drinking Maxwell House for years and years. I can't explain it, but it was everything it was cracked up to be. I just wish I had a bigger beer budget...
So I'm waiting for wxPython to compile, drinking my beer, so I can install BitTorrent, so I can install ISOs of RedHat Enterprise Linux 3, which have been developed by, of all things, a public library in Louisiana. I've also ordered CDs for Debian Linux, Gentoo Linux, and FreeBSD 5.1, just in case. :-) All of this is in response to Red Hat's not-so-recent End-Of-Life announcement regarding their only server-stable public release (i.e., RH 7.3).
Not much else to say other than that... oh, and I received a copy of Unreal Tournament 2003, and will be getting online soon enough (handle: pcgTheDestroyer) to frag the lot of you.
Posted by pcg at November 13, 2003 10:02 PMWhenever you think you're ready, flak bait.
Posted by: alan on November 16, 2003 5:31 PMSammy Smiths is incredible. I also highly recommend their Taddy Porter. Heck, anything they make is good. They could probably put out a beer called "Extremely Ripe Porcupine Piss" and I'd drink it.
Posted by: jonathan on November 16, 2003 6:07 PMwhat no slackware?
ps: the 5.x branch of freebsd is not recommended for production use...
Posted by: chris on November 16, 2003 9:13 PMslackware: convince me why I should use it.
freebsd 5.x: good to know. why not?
(take two, man dialup blows)
wrt freebsd 5.x: see
http://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.1R/early-adopter.html
wrt to slackware:
-package management: slacks package format is just a slightly modified
tar.gz file. no db's to corrupt, package contents are stored in plaintext
and are easily searchable with standard tools. no dependcy hell, a
package manager should not depend on a specific package being installed
to install another package if the dependcy is actualy installed on the
system just not through the package manager IMHO.
-easy management: slack just gets out of your way and lets you manage the
the system the way you want. not making you do things the distros way
(read; why do i have to learn to do things the redhat way, shouldn't it
be learn how to do things the linux way.) and no conf tools to get in your
way, ie; i have seen in redhat's /etc/fstab a comment on the first line
telling me not to edit this file. why?
-vanila kernel: slack ships with a vanila, unpatch Linus kernel. you might
think this a bad thing, but stop and think about installing a kernel from
source on a redhat box where you have done things "the redhat way" and only
install rpm kernels. it is very easy to upgrade kernels on slackware.
-security: slack has a good track record when it comes to security. you won't
see a security alert from slackware about a package that is vunerable due
to how slackware packaged the app. slackware generaly sticks to the default
settings of the third party app author, and leaves you the admin to do the
rest.
-script kiddies: sad but true; script kiddies don't know what to do when
their rpm rootkit won't install because there is no rpm binary to install
rpm's with. (saw it with me own eyes(and yes this only applies to the
stupidest of script kiddies, i know.))
-PAM: draw back. slack does not include PAM support. if you need to do auth
with LDAP or some other non-standard scheme, then you will run into
problems. but you can always install the nsswitch libraries for your given
auth scheme.
i think that is enough for now, but i could go on given more time to think
about it. hope that helps.
i forgot to mention my biggest gripe about other distros. and that is the mess-o-symlinks that is sysv init. slackware uses a bsd'ish style for the init scripts. that is to say that /sbin/init is still sysv init, but the rc scripts are rewritten into a more bsd based layout. and if you want an easy way to add startup scripts i have some patches for ya(i just made slackware use freebsd's /usr/local/etc/rc.d setup.)
Posted by: chris on November 17, 2003 10:02 AM