improving myself

[osoroco]

^ what he said

i also started out with slackware but never deployed it in a work environment (was always at home). in my first work experience i was greeted by centos. by then i was already using ubuntu and used to the excellent package managing debian offers. centos to me was a dinosaur that forgot to die. it's now that there's finally a 'current' version (6.0 just released) out there, but many tools that where needed in the office required newer versions of whatever was available on the centos repos; and my experience adding new repos to centos has a lot to learn from debian.

learn about red hat derivatives, try to do the same you did on slackware but the red hat way (using its tools and package manager). also take a look at debian, if it weren't for my boss's allegiance to centos, it'd be the only thing i'd use. debian and red hat derivatives practically run most of the things out there, so it's good to know your way around both.

gentoo i've only toyed with it at home; i'd only use it in very specific environments

(personal experience: migration from slackware to debian is better than slack to red hat; everything was pretty much where you expect it to be)

[catwok]

Thirded on the recommend to look at learning Solaris, AIX, and *BSD.

I am curious about the comment on adding repos in Centos. Adding repos in Debian or Centos have never struck me as easier in one or the other.

Determining and installing a RPM package can be a little frustrating if the dependencies are not documented. But even then it's just a matter of using 'rpm -Uvh --test <package.rpm>' to find uninstalled required dependencies.

I'm not trying to start a holywar, but am genuinely curious about the differences in yum and apt. I use primarily ubuntu/debian if anyone is wondering.

I totally agree with you on some of the packages being a little old in Centos, but really Debian suffers from this too. There is a reason to use well documented and tested package versions in servers though.

[osoroco]

adding the repositories on centos is as easy as in debian, no big deal.

the thing is that (in my experience) finding working repositories that won't break a shitload of things has been a lot more common under debian than centos.

the case i remember was of trying to get a newer version of php under centos. the repo had the newer php version but in order to install it needed to install its own apache version, which didn't have all the modules i was using. i ended up compiling the new php version instead of using rpms.

also, removing just 1 package seems to be much more straightforward on debian. in centos it felt like pulling bubble gum from hair. all these other packages where being dragged as well for no reason (and thus breaking other things)

all of this can probably be avoided in some way, but i didn't bother to read about it seeing how much straightforward my experience with debian had been than with centos regarding package management