[UFO Chicago] e-mail help

[Nate Riffe]

On Thu, 28 Jun 2001, Peter A. Peterson II wrote:

> Quoting Thomas:
> >    I've taken a quick look and "e-smith"
> >    looks more or less like what I want... easy to set up and maintain (or
> >    so they claim) and I can always fall back to a Mac solution until I
> >    actually get it up and running. 
> 
> Ok. I looked at the e-smith site a little bit, and it looks pretty cool,
> but my first question would be what kind of price-for-support scheme do
> they have, and more imporatntly what kind of update scheme do they have?
> If you ran say, Debian stable, you could have security updates available
> almost the moment they came out.
> 
> Are you coming to the meeting tonight? We might be able to talk about
> other solutions with the other guys (who are probably not as Debian
> centric as I am.)

Hi, my name is Nate, and I use apt-get.  It all started when RedHat
started charging to use up2date.  For a couple of months I couldn't get my
automatic download and install software fix, and I was in pain.  I got
desperate and so I went to rpmfind.net and found apt and dpkg RPMs (from
the Polish(ed) Linux Distribution) and installed them.  But PLD's archives
were not letting me connect, or not reachable, or whatever, so my
addiction went unsatisfied until I modified sources.list and apt.conf to
point to Debian's archives.  Now I just can't stop using it....

Ok, true story...

A coupld years ago I built a machine and named it goose.  I installed
RedHat 6.0 on it and that's what I used for a while.  A year later I got
my hands on a RedHat 6.2 disk and did the upgrade thing from the CD.  So
that was pretty normal, right?  OK, well then when up2date appeared in the
6.2 updates, I got it and set it up and that kicked ass.  Then in about
January or February I got this bright idea.  Up2date figures out what
version of RedHat you're running by reading the file /etc/redhat-release,
which comes from a RPM called (tada) redhat-release.  I downloaded the
redhat-release RPM from 7.0 and installed it, and then when I ran up2date,
it thought I was running a badly out of date 7.0 system (tee hee).  I
slowly but surely upgraded from 6.2 to 7.0 using up2date.  Then at about
the beginning of April, RedHat started charging for access to their
servers.  What do you know, now I'm running Debian, and I installed it all
using apt-get and dselect.  Actually, I haven't rebooted yet, so some of
my VTs still have the RedHat issue on the screen.  It's kind of a trip to
switch back and forth and see different issues from different distros on
the same box.

OK, now you try running a system without libc when you're between distros.

-Nate

------------------------------------------------((\))<----------------------
Nate Riffe			Bring me a selection of the finest meats
inkblot@geocities.com		and cheeses your nation has to offer!