Bill’s Mind

May 7th, 2007

Hi kids! Did you miss me ?

I experienced a few hours of downtime last night, as a result of some minor tweaking on my server. Actually I just added a 2nd IP address, simple right ? Well how is it that a friggin’ wizard like me, can crash a server with something trivial like adding an IP address ? Red Hat Linux, that’s how.

Now I’m usually the one to praise Linux for its hacker appeal and broad configurability, but I’m also quick to point out its big nasty flaws. There are zillions of version of Linux, each with its own peculiarities. There is Ubuntu, which is rather well polished and user-friendly. There is Debian, which is kind of like a K-car… old, ugly but reliable. Red Hat (and CentOS) which is like Debian but more current and driven by marketing. And of course my personal favorite Gentoo, a real do-it-yourself kind of Linux that panders to the obsessive tweaker in me.

With so many different Linux distributions, it seems no one can agree on a standard, consistent configuration. At home I run Debian on an older machine, and Gentoo on the new ones, but my server runs on CentOS, which is a spinoff of Red Hat. I pretty much have to treat them as 3 completely different operating systems. Installing software is different, the settings are in different locations, and of course they each have their unique quirks. On some of them, upgrading is trivial… for others its nearly impossible.

Let’s imagine you’re the tech support for a group of 30 users, and they’re all running Windows. Some are running XP, 2000, Vista, even Windows 98. There are some differences between them all, but they all pretty much work the same way, and if you tell one user to open up the Display Settings in the Control Panel, it’s going to be pretty much the same no matter which version of Windows they have. To do the same in Linux, you have to know exactly where this particular distribution keeps its config files, and hope they’re named the same as everyone else’s (they don’t have to be). Then once you find it, it might be written in some very clever but confusing way, or it might be split up into dozens of little pieces here and there “to keep things manageable”. Heck I still don’t know how to properly set up my video card and I’ve been using various flavors of Linux for over a decade.

So the thing with Linux distributions is someone needs to clean it up and package it into a cohesive product that works out-of-the-box. Ubuntu has come a long way toward that goal, but under the thin veneer it’s still a mess of text files, sneaky scripts and a configuration system that’s just a pile of glorified batch files. Does it really have to be that messy ? Do we really need a million ways to do everything ? Am I going to have to release a new distro myself ? :P