M$-Linux, brain dead by design?
2007-06-13 02:39:11.355067+00 by meuon 0 comments
I spent a few hours today installing a very very simple PHP/MySQL application that we wrote and debugged on an Ubuntu LAMP server, but had to move it to a "licensed" MS-Novell-SUSE 10 box running in a VMware session at a regional bank.
The good news first: It had "joe" the editor as part of the base fresh install.. made it easy for me to edit files.
The bare install, with what was recommended as a LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP/Perl) server was otherwise "brain dead". Missing things I'd consider requirements for any decent LAMP server, like the MySQL driver for PHP, or PEAR and the basic PHP/Pear Modules like: Mail, or the "locate" command.
After using the odd provided commercial licensed SSH terminal (name ??) (and wishing for Putty or Cygwin) and weird other interfaces to the machine like having to run Yast (software installer) via VMWare's management interface (CLI/Term version inop because of bad SSH term).. and having to learn that it's not 'php' it's 'php5' and the pear command is 'pear5' and.. lots of other strange things I realized the truth:
It's this way to make Linux look much MUCH harder to administer and use than it really should be. That's why M$ is pushing M$-Linux via SUSE compatibility, their commercial SUSE package make Linux look kludgy and unfriendly.. for example: the bank IT staff guys were told the ONLY way to edit files via shell was 'vi'. Didn't know about locate, whereis, grep, wget... and yet, these are 'licensed' and 'supported' installs.
I loved freaking them out making a command line dance with powerful useful incantations... once I got them installed.