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The Importance of Being Debian
Orre writes "This is an interesting article on why we should be interested in this non-commercial linux distribution. Some of the points: No lies, Suit-Free Zone, Apt-get. And by the way, Hewlett-Packard has chosen Debian to be their standard linux distribution."
well that's no surprise. HP has supported Debian quite a bit and they employee a few people that have been Debian project leaders including current leader Bdale Garbee.
This is left as an exercise for the reader.
But there is no commercial entity of Debian. So therfore HP et. al can't partner in a commercial sense with it. On the other hand RedHat is a commercial entity - it doesn't mean that HP will use a RedHat distribution though, they might just use some of RedHat's work within Debian.
When I installed Debian for the first time, I wanted to to the same thing, ie. install stable and immediately upgrade to unstable for X4. I found that the easiest way to accomplish this was to do a minimal install of stable, then to modify the apt.source file for unstable, then to dist-upgrade and install X4 and everything else. No X3 packages to worry about at all.
KDE3.0 isn't in unstable yet because of the room it would take on the mirrors. They are waiting for Woody to release before bringing KDE3 into unstable. I don't have the reference in front of me, but there is a deb repository with KDE3 debs for unstable and they work great.
Joe
One of the reasons that Debian doesn't have a graphical installer now is that it's extremely difficult to get one working properly on Debian's 11+ supported platforms.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
Your comment seems to me to imply that one cannot buy Debian with support. However, the article specifically states that HP sells and supports Debian. If one buys a system configured with Debian from HP, HP supports it.
abower@dylan:~$ apt-cache search aspell | wc -l
14
abower@dylan:~$ apt-cache search ispell | wc -l
44
hmmm, yeah only dictionaries for over 21 major languages for ispell.
"It's better to regret something you have done, than to regret something you haven't done" - Orbital
Let's be clear about this. On servers supported to run Linux, HP supports Debian, Mandrake, RedHat, Suse, and TurboLinux. For example, you can purchase an HP buisiness class PC with Mandrake pre-installed, the blade servers come with debian installed on the management blade, in addition to the alliances between RedHat and Oracle for Oracle servers.
The maintainers of gcc pointed out that development branches of gcc are not intended for production purposes and that any software which is compiled with the forthcoming, stable version of gcc (gcc 3.0) would simply not run on Red Hat 7.
What the article omits is that Redhat were right, and the gcc developers were wrong. Sure, you couldn't run gcc 3.0 software on Redhat, but so what ? gcc 3.0 was a botched, DOA release, containing an embarrassing bug that prevented it from compiling KDE correctly, which is why it was "skipped" as a distribution compiler. Redhat havereleased an extended 7.x series waiting for an acceptable distribution compiler (gcc 3.1).
The gcc team are within their rights releasing something that isn't known to compile a package as important as gcc. Redhat, on the other hand, have to make sure that their distribution compiler can build hundreds of packages. In hindsight, it's very clear that Redhats move on gcc was the right one.
Use athlon builder or pentium builder, it will compile optimized binaries
Doing so automatically would be nice
Hmmmm, lots of people are missing the other part of Debian being kernel independant, there is already a port to a BSD kernel in progress and also you can install it with GNU/HURD if you want.
"It's better to regret something you have done, than to regret something you haven't done" - Orbital
This has been definitively addressed. Archives of Debian's legacy distros are hosted here:
http://archive.debian.org/debian-archive/
There are also mirrors of it.
You can get support here
KDE3?? These should do the trick ;-)
./ ./ ./ ./
deb http://kde3.geniussystems.net/debian
deb-src http://kde3.geniussystems.net/debian
deb http://kde.debian.co.nz/debian
deb http://kde.ping.uio.no/i386
It seems he was talking about the proper handling of dependencies. According to Debian policy, the "Recommends" dependency "declares a strong, but not absolute, dependency" and that recommended packages "would be found together with this one in all but unusual installations." Thus, when one installs a package, that packages Recommends dependencies should be satisfied by default, and overridden in "unusual installations." However, apt-get does not satisfy Recommends dependencies. dselect, on the other hand, does satisfy Recommends dependencies, and thus installing using dselect ensures a better installation, without missing important packages.
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." - Thomas Jefferson
- Sounds like you were using dselect. My god, I don't know why that's available in the default install. It's horrible. It really, really sucks. My advice: Don't use it. I've heard some people praise aptitude; I've used it once or twice myself, and it's all right, but I still prefer command-line apt-get. My advice would be not to worry about installing everything up front; that's what you need to do with most other distributions since it's a hassle to add the software later. If you find yourself wanting to install something, use apt-cache search <foo> to look for it and apt-get install <bar> to install it, where foo is a search term and bar is a package name. If you want to install several related packages (say, a full development environment), use tasksel; it will present you with several broad categories from which to choose (such as C development, X window system, mail server, etc.) and you can select zero or more sets of packages to install.
- Init scripts live in
/etc/init.d; the runlevel symlinks are found in /etc/rc?.d. Debian includes a utility called update-rc.d; use this instead of chkconfig (which is not present). Keep in mind that Slackware and *BSD machines have only monolithic init scripts. ;-) - Network device configuration is done via
/etc/network/interfaces; see interfaces(5) for the format of this file.
Hope this helps some if you still want to give Debian a shot. If you have any other questions, let me know.--
Runnin' around, robbin' banks all whacked on the Scooby Snacks...
I've got news for you. The FHS and LSB arn't enough to build a system on. They are guidelines, not a complete system. To build a complete system you need to fill in the gaps around such standards. THIS is where Debian sets itself apart standards-wise: It has them. No other distribution that I know of has open, published standards for: becoming a trusted contributor, how descisions are made, every detail of how a package should and should not be including detailed sections on handling system-wide menu entries, MIME type handlers, EMACS, Java, and Perl languages, and how the whole thing fits together.
Please do show my the equivilents of any of these documents for any other distribution. I really would like to know what disiplines other distributions apply, but I'm too lazy to look it up myslef. I will read any replys.
- RustyTaco