distro blues
Ahh, the geekery. I wonder how many people this has happened to…
So basically, for the last couple years I lived almost exclusively in gentoo for all my linux needs. Sounds good, right? A single distro, albeit a source-based one. I got used to a lot of gentoo-isms. I had my hands in RHEL a bit, I poked a bsd or two a bit, but gentoo was definitely my area of expertise, and my home.
Now I’m not so sure.
See, at work, I run an ubuntu box for my desktop. I’m the only one there on ubuntu, so I’m kinda the odd-man out in that regard (the other sysadmins are on fedora). We’ve also got servers that are fedora, so it’d make sense to be there… but no~oo, I had to install ubuntu instead.
Regardless, the majority of the server functions at work are solaris boxes. So I’m simultaneously getting more comfortable with Ubuntu, getting more comfortable with Fedora, and learning a shitlot about Solaris.
Which is confusing.
See, Gentoo’s got /etc/conf.d. Everything that’s distro-specific is controlled out of there. Things like … default behaviors, network configs, what xdm tool should be called (eg: gdm, kdm, xdm), what options to pass iptables and where to save it, what options to pass in init scripts, etc. It gives a lot of flexibility in a single place, and it’s very clean.
But nobody else does that. At all.
Ubuntu’s got it’s configs strewn all over /etc. Fedora and RHEL shove a lot of, but not all of, their stuff in /etc/sysconfig. Solaris … hell, I still don’t have any idea for half of that stuff … if it’s not in SMF, it’s probably somewhere in /etc, or maybe /var/sadm, or possibly in some random db2 file or something.
But it gets worse. Mainly because of package managers. I am finding myself typing “aptitude search” when I want to find a package on fedora or gentoo, and typing “eix” when I want to find things in ubuntu. I have to remind myself “oh wait, this is ${DISTRO}, not ${OTHERDISTRO}” all the time. This is only exacerbated by the fact that I’ve been building a new fileserver at home, and out of my distros of choice (ubuntu and gentoo), only gentoo’s install cd worked cleanly on the new hardware. On the bright side, at least solaris doesn’t have a sane auto-updating package manager to work with at all, so there’s one less thing to think about.
So yeah, that’s my life these days :p