[Kde-i18n-fa] farsi in RedHat 9

[Hossein S. Zadeh]

On Sat, 3 May 2003, Hamid wrote:

> By the way, why all you guys are a great fan of RedHat ;)
> Is it because they have the largest share of the Linux market or they 
> really have problem.
> I have not tried any other distribution, but as far as easy setup and 
> variety of applications is concerned, I did not find any drawbacks.


Hi there,
I started using Slackware Linux in 1992, and later (around 1995)  
switched to RH (version 3.0.3) because of the "rpm" package management.

At the time, RH was the only Linux distro that had rpm (I was a senior 
Digital Unix administrator at the time, and had to come to expect "proper" 
package management as well as GUI admin tools--and no, I am not THAT 
old, I started very young ;-)  ).

Since then, RH, at times, has done some of the things against most other
people in the industry. This is against the spirit of cooperation. In an 
ideal world, one who knows Linux should be comfortable using it regadless 
of the distro. This has not always been the case with RH.

RH actions, at times, compromised stability and/or compatibility of their
distros. For example, a couple of years ago, they decided to use gcc 3
which at the time was at alpha/beta stage. This broke a lot of things (you
couldn't even compile the kernel any more unless you "downgrade" to gcc
2.9x).

These days, there are lots of other distros which provide similar
functionality and/or convenience as RH. Most other distros (including Suse
and Mandrake) have adopted "rpm" package management. Suse has the edge on
number of packages that it comes with. Any package you care to name,
chances are that Suse already has that on the CDs/DVD. Mandrake on the
other hand, has made their distro very user-friendly.  Mandrake also
compiles all of their packages for 586 or above (while most others compile
for 386 and above). This makes Mandrake packages somehow a bit faster (of
course only for certain applications).

The only other major Linix package management system is Debian's "deb"  
system. I do believe "apt-get" (the usual user interface to "deb") is
superior to rpm. Debian has been ported to a lot of other systems, so if
you use any system other than an x86, you probably need to use Debian.  
For example, I use "Familiar" (a port of Debian to StrongARM CPU) on my
Compaq iPAQ PDA. It IS cool to ssh into my handheld PDA, and run apt-get
there to get it up-to-date...

Debian is the only major remaining distro that is 100% GPLed. This fact
alone is enough to convert many Linux users to Debian.  This also means
that Debian does not have to follow a certain pattern for their releases,
and also has the effect of the applications being usually far more
thoroughly tested. My persoanl experience is that, on average, Debian
systems appear to be more stable than other Linux distros. The drawback is
that installation of Debian is a pain in the a#$%@ (compared to other
distros available these days).

I persoanlly use RedHat on my workstaions and laptop. But I do install 
apt-get straight after installing RH, so I get best of both worlds. On 
servers, I install a text-only version of either RedHat or Debian. 

I have stayed away from Suse because the last version I installed a few
years ago (I think it was version 6) had most of the menus and man pages
in German (even though I chose English during installation). I am sure it 
has changed by now, but I have never had the time to play with it again.

This is just my experience. I recommend whatever distro you've got, why 
change if you are happy? After all they are all Linux, right?


cheers,
Hossein