On Tue, May 07, 2002 at 08:13:37AM -0600, Ben Franchuk wrote:
> Doc wrote:
> >
> > On Mon, 6 May 2002, Richard Erlacher wrote:
> > It has the most godawful package selection interface - dselect - in
> > Creation. "Tasksel", the alternative, and the commandline tools are
> > fairly straightforward and easy, but dselect has frightened away many a
> > prospective Debianista.
> > Debian has a rep for being the "hackers' distro", and for being very
> > raw. It does take more work initially to bring up a Debian install.
> > After that, it's a no-brainer. Everything is done.
> >
> > The truth is, I like RedHat, if anybody besides me has root or
> > "elevated" privileges. It's as close to a Universal Distribution as
> > there is. And it has KickStart.
> > I do Linux training, and a lot of it is on RedHat, so when I
> > say it's easy to use, install and learn, I'm not talking through my hat.
> >
> > Doc
>
> But like I have said Debian lets you install from a modem, Red Hat
> does not. The big advantage of linux is that you can back up the
> system. The disadvantage is that you can't run games or some software.
Can't run games on Linux? Then all those hours I wasted playing 3D games
like RTCW, Quake3 Arena, Kohan, Rune, Urban Terror and friends on my
Linux system here were just a machination of my fantasy? I don't think
so. The "no games on Linux" rap is old - but since quite some time it's
simply false.
> What pisses me off is the fact that both systems use dynamic libraries.
> This makes a real mess of things.
This is actually a _huge_ advantage. Try linking some commonly used
Linux programs - one time dynamically, one time statically. It's _huge_
difference. For example, take bash2 (default (and most popular) shell
under Linux), Version bash 2.05a:
- dynamically linked, not stripped: 1675923 bytes
- dynamically linked, stripped (debug info thrown out): 534428 bytes,
- statically linked, not stripped: 2096430 bytes
- statically linked, stripped: 907092 bytes
So, we are talking a twofold increase in binary size, which results not
only in the resulting binary eating twice as much diskspace, but also
twice as much memory for text pages during runtime.
The dynamic version is linked against (here):
- libncurses.so.5 (terminal handling): 248132 bytes
- libdl.so.2: 8008 bytes
- libc.so.6 (C runtime library): 1153816 bytes
- /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (Linux dynalinker): 90210 bytes
Using dynamic linking is one of the great steps in software technology.
Not only can you gather the most commonly used routines in _one_ place
(instead of scattering them repeatedly over every binary), you also can
maintain them separately from the binaries. Which also helps system
security: a security critical bug in a library routine? Fix the code,
exchange the library, all programs vulnerable to this bug and
dynamically linked against the library are instantly fixed - the
statically linked ones have to be recompiled and if you don't have the
source code to them ... you're screwed.
Regards,
Alex.
--
Those who desire to give up Freedom in order to gain Security, will not
have, nor do they deserve, either one. -- Benjamin Franklin
Received on Tue May 07 2002 - 15:32:31 BST