suse+oracle (terminal), ubuntu
So, in the end, I spent almost a week with suse and oracle, trying to figure out how to use it, or get it to simply start cleanly. And then when I was realizing that it was a complete failure and that I’d have to delete it all and start over, my boss mentioned something like “they’re just strings in the database, right”?” and I was like “strings ….. strings ….. STRINGS!!!!!”. And after a week of wheel-spinning, trying to use the “correct” tool for the job, I ended up using the “right” tool for the job instead. And a week of fucking with oracle turned into “strings w_orc.dmp > /tmp/oracledump.txt”. And everyone was happy.
So, yeah, I don’t understand oracle. But I’m moving on for now. I’ll come back to it later, I think.
Speaking of moving on, I found that while SuSe’s installer was sweet, and got me rolling right away, with a lot of good options, none of those options could directly solve the underlying problems preventing users from correctly, cleanly log into the samba domain with their samba privs. It got as far as authenticating, but just couldn’t make the last step and mount home directories. I guess because I really need to be handing out userids from an ldap server to make that work.
On the other hand, it tells me that when I’m handing out userids on an ldap server, I’ll be able to have a truly mixed environment. Which’ll be cool. The crazy ldap backend plans and winbind auth plans can still come to fruition, albeit not in the immediate future.
So, I had enough with SuSe and its lack of free support and its dependence on YaST, so I decided I’d poke around with Ubuntu a bit.
Wiped the linux partitions, left the windows partition alone. Installed ubuntu. The installer was pretty painless. Grub config detected the windows partition and gave me a bootloader option for it. As with SuSe, X worked out of the box. Unlike SuSe’s KDE default, Ubuntu defaults to gnome. Which was fine, I haven’t been in a modern gnome desktop in a while. It worked, nothing great or special, but it worked.
Interestingly, unlike other distros that have you set a root password and create a user account, this doesn’t even give you the option to set a root password. It just outright makes a user account, and gives that account sudo access. It’s an interesting paradigm …. don’t even give people root, just give them the equivalent and hope they start living in userland for most stuff.
My first impressions of ubuntu are good. It’s not as easy to manage as YaST on SuSe is, but it’s definitely a lot easier to get running than say Gentoo. I think as far as management goes, I can see most users living in SuSe, and everyone but power users could pretty easily live in ubuntu too. My biggest concerns are the dependencies installed by default. There’s a lot of random stuff that a debian install brings with it, and I haven’t yet checked to see what’s on or off by default. It is nice, I’ll admit, not having to wait for compiles though. Like, installing samba, openldap, apache, php4 and mod_php4, mysql and subversion on gentoo is at least a solid hour and a half, maybe 2-3 hours of compiling. Binary package systems like ubuntu make that “how long does it take you to download 30 megs”. Which is why they exist in the first place.
I’m going to make it a point to start paying attention to other distros on the security update notifications on secunia and such. I know gentoo is one of the most vigorously updated, I wonder how these others fare there though.