[racket] Building Racket 5.2.1 on 64-bit Ubuntu?

From: Neil Van Dyke (neil at neilvandyke.org)
Date: Sun Jun 24 20:24:42 EDT 2012

Ray Racine wrote at 06/24/2012 07:11 PM:
> I don't think it is Racket related. I'v experienced a few 100% cpu 
> lockups on the latest Ubuntu, including once or twice when building 
> Racket.

FWIW, I've built 5.2.1 from source a few times on Debian for x86 without 
problem, as have consulting clients of mine for various versions of 
Ubuntu on 32-bit and 64-bit.

Side comment: for development workstations and servers, I'm generally 
happier with Debian (the stable version) than with Ubuntu.  For example, 
I once found that Ubuntu introduced a small DoS vulnerability in Apache 
somehow (Debian didn't have it), which caused one of my clients some 
headaches.  I couldn't find any Ubuntu developers who understood the 
problem I was reporting, but Debian developers I talked with understood 
immediately.  This helped confirm my earlier bias: I think of Ubuntu as 
more for less-technical home users than for software techies.  I've seen 
people go Ubuntu because Debian was already proven for then, and Ubuntu 
essentially offered Debian with the respectability of support 
contracts.  And perhaps Ubuntu could be for corporate desktops that for 
whatever reason aren't running RHEL or CentOS, and that want to give 
their users something more slick-looking than Debian (and without their 
users getting Debian guilt-trips if they want to run closed-source 
bits).  Debian has also seemed better with security updates (and I 
sometimes give sys-admins at Ubuntu-using clients a heads-up on Debian 
security advisories), though I haven't compared the distros in that 
regard recently.  If you're accustomed to pretty Ubuntu, you might find 
Debian more homely, or in need of more tweaking.  (Or, if you're using 
XMonad and avoiding most Gnome crud, you might not much notice the 
different in look between the two distros.)

Neil V.


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