Re: Which Linux distribution for Fortran 95?

From: TimC (tconnors_at_no.astro.spam.swin.accepted.edu.here.au)
Date: 05/21/04 

Date: Fri, 21 May 2004 04:08:43 GMT

Dr. Richard E. Hawkins (aka Bruce) was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea:
> In article <c78ppf$bbd$1@news01.cit.cornell.edu>,
> Kamaraju Kusumanchi <kk288@cornell.edu> wrote:
>>Steve Lionel wrote:
>>> Distributors don't pay to get supported. Compiler vendors look at the
>>> distributions their customers are most likely to use and decide which distros
>>> the compiler needs to be qualified on. Debian is not popular with commercial
>>> customers, and its weak support for RPMs tends to keep it off the radar screen
>>> here.

I hear there are a couple of supercomputer installations who use
Debian. They would tend to pay big money, wouldn't they? (although the
people running supercomputers, I have found, are smart enough to be
able to work around any problems created by using an "unsupported"
flavour of Linux - after all, ifc always has worked on Debian with a
little bit of work, as long as they agree on which glibc to use).

>>I am sorry to disagree. But I think debian's .deb files together with
>>apt-get is much more useful and powerful than redhat's rpm -U, or rpm
>>-i. Personally I used redhat for abt 6 years and then shifted to Debian
>>couple of years back and soon realized that RPM dependency is a hell.
>
> But that's not what he said. Debian *doesn't* handle RPM's well,
> whether or not .deb format is superior.

It'd be better if vendors made the trouble to make .debs -- if they
have already made the rpms, then they have the infrastructure to make
.debs, since they do much the same thing. There is also much less
complication in the .deb world, since all .debs work on all
distributions using dpkg (lindows, knoppix, etc), yet there are so
many differnt versions of rpm, and you can't generally trivially mix
an rpm destined for one distrib onto another distrib (it works in some
cases by pure luck - and the FHS doesn't help you when it comes to the
mess rpm V3 vs V4 etc creates). I'm guessing the intel supplied rpms
only work on maybe redhat and SuSE?

>>Ofcourse it is a personal preference. But I would like to hear opinions
>>from people who have used both (rpm based distros and debian)...
>
> As with many other people, Debian was my final linux distribution.
>
> Then, like so many others, I switched to FreeBSD :)

I got me an old diskless sparcstation for my bedroom, and the comments
on installation were along the lines of "NetBSD is trivial to setup a
diskless client, using any flavour Unix server you want, but of course
Linux makes this a lot harder". I still persevered - I know Linux
well, I know the BSD's not (and I prefer to use GNUised tools to
traditional BSD UNIX tools). I've got everything but xdm working now -
the server is refusing to answer for some bizaare reason (I modified 3
config files and slaughtered two chickens, but still no luck). 

-- 
TimC -- http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/staff/tconnors/
size doesn't matter, resolution matters:
Hmm, I might be able to use that one tonight. -- someone on /.

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