[LBo] Ubuntu crashes on shutdown

[Niki Kovacs]

David Roseman a écrit :
> Thats interesting Niki.
> 
> I had not heard too much about the instability issues.  As I like to tinker,
> what was top in your list ?
> 
I wouldn't exactly say "instability". I don't know the english word for 
it, but in french it's "finition". Say you want to travel on a motorbike 
and you compare a BMW to a Moto Guzzi. Both are very nice bikes, but you 
will notice that many Guzzi bikers will have electrical problems under 
heavy rain... whereas the BMW drivers will have no problem at all. You 
take a close look at the cablework, and you know why that is :oD

Believe me: I would have liked to like Ubuntu, if I may say so. Their 
approach and philosophy is very appealing to me, and in quite some 
respects they did some serious work. But then, they did some horrible 
things to CUPS (drove me mad to setup a printer server with it), or some 
php modules were unusable (and bug reports ignored). Small things maybe, 
and I know I'm being difficult, but it adds up.

My first on the list was CentOS 5.0, to answer your question. CentOS is 
an exact clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, minus the artwork. It's 
primarily aimed at the server market, though it can be (and in fact is) 
a base for a no-bullshit stealth desktop. And if you miss some packages, 
the rpmforge and kbsingh repos probably have what you need (think vlc, 
mplayer, xpenguins...). And if you can't find that one package, FC6 
SRPMs will always compile on it.

There's a nice article by Carla Schroder about CentOS:

http://www.enterprisenetworkingplanet.com/netos/article.php/3673966

It reads like this:

"Some folks love life on the edge, so they run Debian Unstable, or the 
newest Ubuntu or Fedora releases. These are all wonderful Linux 
distributions, and under most circumstances are reliable enough. You'll 
run into weird dependency issues, or find out the hard way that the 
latest release of an application has a few problems, or that the 
distribution maintainers introduced entirely new applications that are 
chock-full of amusing surprises. For the most part they work well, but 
you never know when they're going to get bored and have a little fun at 
your expense."


(...)

"After installation there is a refreshing lack of drama. It just works."

(...)

You get the idea. And just in case you want to know: CentOS 4 has 
updates until 2013, and CentOS 5 until 2020. That's what I call LTS :oD

And yes, it's free. As in speech. And in beer.

Cheers,

Niki