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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."
Seems I just read an article on Slashdot that said Mandrake, or was it Red Hat and Oracle and HP were partnering. Oh, that's right. HP, Red Hat, and Oracle are partnering on advanced business servers. Imagine that, no mention of Debian.
HP has been quite supportive in the development of the HPPA Linux port, but with rumors abound of the possible demise of the PA-RISC platform, what might the effect be on this Linux port? On the other hand, I also wonder if HP's strong support for PA-RISC Linux may indicate their intention to keep PA-RISC around. Just some questions to ponder...
-- Never hit a man with glasses. Hit him with a baseball bat.
Debian has long been one of my favorite Linux distributions. It's nice to see it get some coverage from mainstream Linux media (other than Taco's postings).
However, I've recently begun to be put off by Debian's pace of accepting newer desktop technology. Yes, Debian is a truly free Linux distribution, with a great social contract. But I'm wondering if that's now starting to affect the quality of the distribution. Because it's a volunteer effort, packages updates are slow to come for new versions. The maintainers that do keep their packages updated regularly are often held back by other maintainers of depended packages. This makes it very frustrating for the users who just want to be able to run KDE3 (for instance). Potato is now several years old, but it continues to be the stable release. I can't even consider running Potato on my servers, because older packages are holding back newer, exciting features, such as winbind or iptables.
I will always love Debian, and will probably continue running Woody on my servers. However, I've switched my desktop over to Gentoo, and I haven't looked back. I'm still running a truly free, volunteer Linux distribution, but at least I'm not held captive by slow package maintainers.
Well I was a Debian user from 98 till last month when I found that on not 3 completely different system could I install debian. (going from the stable 6.2r6 cd's to unstable for X4 which I have to have) A laptop, desktop and small X-terminal type box. The big problem was that there is parts of X3 and parts of X4 tossed all over the place so attempting to upgrade X is just about impossible and after 2 1/2 months I finally gave up and loaded Red Hat to my dismay. (At first I thought it was just a bad package, but those are normally fixed within minutes and not months) On the bright side Red Hat has a nice cool installer and gives me a lot more of what I want to start from. I remember spending a good day after getting Debian up and running configuring everything from X11, my mouse, my network, my firwall, etc etc. Untill there is a debian release that has X4 as the default I will be unfortunettly watching from the sidelines, but when it does I will be back there in a heartbeat simply for apt-get.
-Benjamin Meyer
P.S. Why isn't kde3.0 intigraded into unstable yet???
Do you changes clothes while making the "chee-chee-cha-cha-choh" transformation sound?
Debian may be great at what it does, but Red Hat and others that offer a support model will continue to win enterprise contracts because the manager types want three questions answered:
1) Does it do what we need?
2) How much does it cost?
3) Can we get support for it?
If any of these questions can't be answered positively, then chances are they aren't going to approve it. With support they usually mean "from the same person that sells it."
Listen to this typical tale for the World O'Debian. When Debian 2.0 came out, they immediately erased all vestiges of Debian 1.3 from every server on the net. It didn't occur to them that someone might be using Debian 1.3 in a production environment. To them it was all hobby, so ... hey, just upgrade to 2.0. Well,
that was not an option for me. I was not about to be forced to upgrade on their timetable. I and others still needed access to the stable 1.3 archives but we were screwed.
Some months later after a lot of disgruntled users complained, the 1.3 archives were restored for net access. By that time the damage had been done, and I and other professionals had moved on to something more trustworthy (and no, what happened with 1.3 was not the odd case -- it was standard operating procedure for Debian).
Just because a group doesn't profit off of something, doesn't mean they won't lie. Most of these people hack for prestige instead of profits. And prestige can be even more of a motivator to lie than profits..
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
I've been using Debian for almost a year now, and I couldn't be happier. As for the article making it seem that you can't get the latest goodies from Debian, that may have been misleading.
The Debian team maintains 3 branches, Stable, Testing, and Unstable. While Stable uses Kernel 2.2 and XFree86 3, Testing gives you kernel 2.4.16, XFree86 4, and other, up-to-date goodies.
My only complaint about Debain is that the install can be painful, especially to those used to more graphical oriented tools. But the fact that you can burn a 30meg CD and do an install over the internet is very nice (netinst), and once you get used to apt-get, you'll wonder how you got by without it.
Apt-get makes upgrades/installations much easier.
I love it. But I was curious to see Ian Jackson, dpkg developer, say in this interview that he didn't think apt was so hot. Clearly Ian has a better perspective than I do. Can someone explain Ian's perspective? I don't really understand his objections very well.
--Lawrence Lessig for Congress!
If you are looking for a non commercial distribution that is always being updated you might want to try Gentoo (http://www.gentoo.org). Currently the distribution is using Gnome2 and KDE 3.0.2. The reason I chose it over RedHat is it builds everything from source code so that it is compiled to take advantage of ones hardware and updating is very easy to do. Every once and a while, I type: 'emerge -u world' and it downloads the latest and greatest sources, builds them all optimized for my hardware, and then installs them. Some people set up a cron job to do this nightly. Another thing that I like is one starts out with a bare bones system and then installs only what they want to use which prevents things from getting bloated and running a lot of stuff that one does not use but may be a potential security risk.
kernel_package. it kicks ass.
haven't had a chance to try the
network cluster installer, but have heard excellent things.
many of the maintainers, kitame esp for providing mozilla builds with CVS fixes weeks before they made it into proper releases.
being able to upgrade from slink to woody in about an hour. I've never ever reinstalled debian, never had to.
Yes, but effectivelty no packet management a very bad way to mange most commercial installations (as Slackware fans don't seem to realise).
:-)
:-) In the instance of a personal desktop in your own home it's entirely personal preference, BUT problems do arise when people who only really know one distribution well and don't understand suffer from Fear Uncertainty and Doubt about package managment and so opt for or advocate something like Slackware, which, IMO does not belong in most commercial organizations for the above reasons.
(Disclaimer this post is not entirely directed at you, just an appropriate place to put this, and they are comments I thought were worth making
Most Slackware users I know don't, for example, know much about others systems (e.g. HURD, BSD or Solaris) or more about running a professional system (e.g. running SNMP, tools like HP OpenView, RiverSoft, implimenting Madatory Access Controls, Access Control Lists or Capabilties)
I don't want to get into flame war, but I'm using that to try and illustrate that most of the maintainers of the the few 'production' Slackware based systems I've personally met are amoung the least professional (in my experience) and fall more into the 'quick hack' category and fail to realise why package management is so very important. Additionaly, Slackware has previously contained very serious exploitable holes for over 6 months at a time, but due to it's 'Slack' nature, they were not fixed (despite patched code being avalible in every other distribution) - the idea of a 6 month old distribution with many known holes being installed and no quick upgrade path (via packagemanagement or even service packs) makes me think that many of the holes will never get patched and so the systems will continue to be unpatched and easily exploitable.
I'd certainly say that serious professional production system often require custom complied and installed applications (such as Apache, Exim or Bind), jails configured, ACL's setup, MAC's applied, and an appropriate kernel built or tweaked for inteded use (depending on the OS), but:
(a) these can be easily turned into packages meaning they can be more easily rolled out accross large installations, even automatically using your own Debian package server and a cron job on each system, for example
&
(b) most of the software on a system (small utilites like tar, dd, cron and libraries) do not need to be complied manualy on every machine.
The key benifits of package management, as featured in unix operating systems like Debian, Red Hat, Solaris and Mac OS X, are:
- Stability.
By using prebuilt know-to-work binanies designed for a given platform that have very specific dependancies you are running a known good configuration (by any practicle definition).
- Security.
Using packages insures that patches are always applied in the correct order and it's easy to see which updates have been applied and which have not, by simply listing the installed packages compared with a list from the vendor. This way, thanks to the aid of the vendor (e.g. Sun or Apple, or Debian) you can rely on their knowledge and experience to help keep you secure and up-to-date against known issues.
Additionally, you can do fingerprinting and watermarking to detect modified files.
- Efficiency.
Manually compiling updates on each server, satisfiying dependancies is long and tedious work, even if you only have 20-30 machines.
By having a package management system you can updated them all simply by making a package avalible in a single location and having them all grab it automatically, making upgrades take minutes, rather than hours or days.
-Ease.
By using a 'standard' system like Red Hat, Debian, Solaris or even Mac OS X, it's easy for any other administrator to know where programs and configuration files will be and to see what uprades you've performed and to manage the system.
Through increased efficiency this translates into direct cost savings too (another benifit).
Now of course entirely different rules apply if it's a system for a *personal* desktop!
Not really...
HPs first foray into Linux was Red Hat.
Then they switched to Debian.
Then they switched back to Red Hat.
They are also listed as partners in United Linux.
In short, HP can't make up their mind. Note that the new Itanium 2 (McKinley, IA64) products such as zx2000, rx2600, zx6000, are all shipping with Red Hat, not Debian. Also true I think, for rx5670 and rx9610.