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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."
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."
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!
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!