[NCLUG] Fedora 6 and the RaLink rt2500 wireless card

[Chad Perrin]

On Mon, Dec 11, 2006 at 04:12:13AM -0700, Sean Reifschneider wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 10, 2006 at 11:52:22AM -0700, Chad Perrin wrote:
> >from other Linux distributions, to varying degrees.  Worse, they all
> >tend to change fundamental behavior a lot from one release to the next,
> >and they all seem to encourage distro-specific configuration tools over
> 
> Wow, you must have been using a different Fedora and Debian than I have.  I
> mean, yeah, Fedora does provide the system-config-* tools, but these mostly
> just write flat back-end files and I almost never use them except for
> "system-config-display --reconfig" when I move to a different display type.
> 
> Can you provide some more concrete details of what exactly you're talking
> about?

encouraging use of distro-specific configuration tools:
  system-config-network
  system-config-network-cmd
  system-config-network-tui
  system-config-network-druid

changing behavior for network configuration:
  netconfig (formerly preferred network configuration tool, also
             distro-specific)
  rhncfg-client (also formerly preferred, but older than netconfig)
  netcfg (ditto)

discouraging avoidance of distro-specific tools:
  /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0
  /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1
  and so on . . .

I'd comment on how the location of the paths and filenames for network
configuration files has changed, but there's such a culture of
anti-file-editing for configuration in the Red Hat and Fedora users
community that all any of the websites that discuss network
configuration for Fedora and RHL actually address is the
RH/Fedora-specific configuration scripts and GUI tools.

SuSE started following RH's lead a few years ago on moving the network
configuration files around, but seems to have stopped in mid-stream, and
(last I checked) has configuration files that are about equivalent to
RH/Fedora files circa 2002 or 2003, with minor changes specific to SuSE.

Speaking of SuSE, and adding in Mandrake, they get into the
distro-specific tools by discouraging use of anything that doesn't have
YAST or drak (respectively) in the name.

In all three, documentation of the underlying configuration file system
and distro-agnostic toolsets is lacking, distro-specific toolsets are
emphasized, and the tools and configuration files have a history of
migrating from one state to another as new OS release versions are
produced.  At least, that's my experience.

It gets even worse, when the configuration toolset is both non-unified
and almost entirely undocumented, as with the various drak* tools for
Mandrake were (I haven't really used Mandriva enough to be sure the
current state of affairs is the same).

Disclaimer:
I don't want anyone to read this and think I'm specifically
anti-RH/Fedora, anti-Mandr(ake|iva), and/or anti-SuSE.  I found that the
way other distributions such as Debian, Gentoo, Slackware, and so on do
things in terms of toolsets and configuration files is more to my taste.
Specifically, they're more universal and regularized, and the skills
transfer more easily between distributions.  There are benefits to using
the more corporate distributions, however, such as commercial software
support (a year ago, getting Alias to give telephone support for Maya on
anything but RHEL, one of the Fedora releases, or exactly one SuSE
release was like pulling teeth) and a greater availability of
third-party commercial documentation (it's only recently that when a
book in the store said "Linux" it didn't necessarily mean RHL, RHEL, or
Fedora).

I'm still not really clear on how putting configuration files in scripts
directories provides any benefits, however, or why they should be three
levels deep in the filesystem hierarchy, or what benefit there is to
breaking up a single, relatively simple configuration into several
separate files.

-- 
CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
This sig for rent:  a Signify v1.14 production from http://www.debian.org/