Re: Postgres on Linux - was 'Complete breakdown of pgadmin when trying to connect to server or modify properties of tables of views'

On Wednesday 12 March 2008, Dave Page wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 8:09 AM, Devrim GÜNDÜZ <devrim(at)commandprompt(dot)com>
wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> >
> > On Wed, 2008-03-12 at 13:27 +1100, Andrew wrote:
> >
> > > Which Linux distro's support Postgres releases the best? Which are
> > > best suited in a server vs. development suite of tools?
> >
> > "Best" is a bit debatable, but Ubuntu/Debian and Fedora/RHEL/CentOS
have
> > very good PostgreSQL support. I'm using both of these, and both sides
> > are doing good jobs.
>
> Ubuntu is the distro that we have the most problems with pgAdmin on.
> Apparently there have been distro-specific patches applied to
> wxWidgets in the past which haven't played well. It seems better
> recently though.
>
> Both the latest Suse and Ubuntu introduce changes in GTK which will
> cause pgAdmin to crash if wxWidgets was built against an older version
> of GTK. That can be fixed either by recompiling against the new
> llbraries, or setting an environment variable which tells GTK to work
> the old way. I expect to see this issue in other distros in the
> not-to-distant-future.
>
> Personally, I'm using Slackware, Fedora 7 and CentOS 5.1, though I
> don't run any production systems these days. Most of my work is on
> Windows XP and Mac OS X though.
>
> --
> Dave Page
> EnterpriseDB UK Ltd: http://www.enterprisedb.com
> PostgreSQL UK 2008 Conference: http://www.postgresql.org.uk

I am new in December to the Postgres/pgadmin suite and have been running
both on SuSE 10.0 and 10.3. The RPM's for Postgres I have had no problems
with, and the recent 8.2.6 security update came through the SuSE update
service without incident on 10.3. I have never bothered with RPM's for
pgadmin3 because I have no trouble compiling and installing it, so I
always get a more recent version.

I would like the opportunity to give this list a little background on how
we got where we are, through one set of eyes.

I am, I suppose at this point in my 53 year life, "Old School", having cut
my teeth on Microlite Unix in '86 (AT&T man pages were the only
documentation) followed by SCO Unix. After I learned Unix, I was exposed
to MS-DOS, and needless to say it came across as trivially easy. MS-DOS
was the last operating system that "they" marketed that worked well, and
they didn't even develop the core package. In May of 2001, a vice
president of Microsoft declared war on the free software movement when
Linux had hit a deeply threatening 1% market share. On the day I learned
of this, my Win95 box was retired and I installed Caldera Linux and have
not looked back. When Caldera went away I chose SuSE for its superior
documentation and have frankly not look seriously at other distros because
it proverbially does what I need ... everything.

Many of you people out there on this list are using any of many variants of
Linux. Each distribution of Linux is like a priceless jewel in the crown
of human cooperation, cooperation that you have few other models for in
this world. By all means, debate the merit of each distribution, but I
must say that Linux is the most beautiful thing that ever happened to
computing, and if your distro has trouble with a widget, there will be a
fix soon.

I feel greatly enriched since I discovered Postgres and pgadmin and what is
to me a new programming paradigm of putting the business logic in the
database. Everytime I download one of these freely available packages, I
marvel.

Arthur Knight Hammer