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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.
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.
I use debian extensivly, mainly because its a no frills linux distro, i get exactly what it says on the tin. That said, it may not be the right distro for everyone, but once you get used to using a text editor to configure things, your a master at using debian.
The main reason i changed in the beginning was because of apt, which i saw demonstrated. It rocked me, when i saw how easy it was to install a whole bunch of apps. Funny thing is, these days for big things like apache, mysql, exim etc i tend to build from source to get it EXACTLY how i want it. But then theres distros out there that do exactly that, maybe its time for a change.....
I'm *realy* shocked ...
--- Als de angst oprukt, trekt de logica zich terug.
I have preferred Debian for years, even though I don't spend a whole lot on time in Linux these days. Apt-get makes upgrades/installations much easier.
I belive many of the benefits of Debian would transition it well to Joe Average level users, once the interface/windowing stumbling blocks are overcome.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
The importance of being Debian? Are we going to start some sort of non-Debian using witch hunt now then?
Whats the penalty for not using Debian?
Syllable : It's an Operating System
You could also say the same about the dreamcast logo if you wanted to tho.... http://www.dreamcast.com/games/dreamcast/home_drea mcast.jhtml;jsessionid=WH4KC0KJMFLK0CRSBUFCNHAKGIG RIMS5
RoseColor red={0, 0xffff, 0x0000, 0x0000};VioletColour blue={0, 0x0000, 0x0000, 0xffff};find / -name *mybase*|chown you
I'm really shocked too, specially since I used to work for Electroflux as summer jobs in high school.
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.
Hi there. The article is nice, but yet it describes Debian just as another Linux distribution. Don't get me wrong, but I think that you can write and say a lot of good things about any Linux distribution, as long as you're the one who runs it. I have nothing against Debian, RedHat, Slackware, etc., but I think that every distribution is good in its own way. The article is nice, but I do not think that it should be 'another reason' for using Debian. Come on, people, it is just a matter of personal preference. Let's not start 'emacs vs. vi' or 'us vs. them' wars again. If it works great for you... that is just wonderful! Thanks,
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?
Well, in that case...
Let the slashdotting begin!
-twb
Finaly someone made sence and used something else than redhat
There isn't much like the scent of a fresh harddisk
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."
- Being non commercial doesn't prevent lies.
- Judging people by the clothes they wear is immature.
- Most RPM based distributions have been able to download a package and all their dependencies a while now using a variety of different mechanisms. There's a few good uniques features of dpkg (just as there are rpm feaures) but its easier to implement these features on rpm than to convert most Linux systems to using another packaging format.
The LSB exists to provide the standards. No Linux distribution, not Debian, not Red Hat, not anyone else, has a current LSB complaint distribution. Download the test suites from linuxbase.org and see for yourself.F**k advocacy. Use the best tool for the job.
My /etc/apt/sources.list (extracts):
../project/experimental main contrib non-free
./ ./
# Gnome 2:
deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian
# KDE 3:
deb http://kde3.geniussystems.net/debian/
deb http://people.debian.org/~bab/kde3
# E17:
deb http://people.debian.org/~ljlane/downloads e17/
'nuff said.
If you want the greatest and latest, you got it. Debian Developers are not necessarily using potato, they like features as much as anybody else. But Debian's "stable" stamp is something that has much more weight than that.
Besides, Debian has that annoying habit of usually doing the right thing. That's what the article is about, really.
-- don't discount flying pigs until you have good air defense
I ripped off the entire Debian. I'm running it on my machine now. :-]
"I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them." -- George H. W. Bush
Looking at the sign you could say there twice as big :-)
--- Als de angst oprukt, trekt de logica zich terug.
I think a paid debian archive is worthwhile, the current mirrors are fast.
This has been tried, but it is really hard to hit that critical mas.
Think a debian based dist, with up to date software, good stable Staroffice and such all easy to upgrade and certified by someone.
The Importance of All Linux Distros and this includes Debian :)
is to give you an idea why you need to use Slackware
Never learn by your mistakes, if you do you may never dare to try again
I'm thrilled to hear that a major computer manufacturer finally went with Debian. I love apt-get. I tried uninstalling something the other day on our Redhat server at work. oops... can't do that, that would break these dependencies. Ok, lets add those to the list... oops... can't do that, that would break THESE dependencies. Oh.. that and the fact that you can't update anything from the web. Or install packages to MEET the requirements of the package you were originally trying to install. Love the splendor that is apt-get. nems
Seriously though, isn't the actual logo trademarked by Debian? I know that several other big distros have trademarks on their logos and so on, and it must be under copyright cover at the very least. Maybe it's time for a "cease and desist and make a (large) contribution to the EFF" order?
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
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.
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).
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.
Never seen it.
Not only that, it seems I have missed the point of the entire article. It seems to me to simply be Debian good! Like Debian! apt-get good! Like apt-get! Ohhh, Debian good!
I can get that here on Slashdot, day in, day out. Seriously, was there some underlying sub-theme to the article that I should find interesting?
Syllable : It's an Operating System
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
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.
After many years of using RPM based distros
(first Red Hat, then Mandrake), I switched to Debian about a year ago. I had heard so many wonderful things about apt and I wanted to try it for myself.
The best decision I ever made. I had many frustrating moments trying to install or upgrade
RPM based software, in many cases hosing the system (XFree86 comes to mind). Upgrading software using apt-get is a snap, I was so pleased when I upgraded from XFree86 v 3.x to 4.x (can't remember exact versions) using apt without a glitch.
One thing that kept me from switching to Debian earlier was I heard it was out of date, not a problem for me, I run the "unstable" distro, also known as Sid, and I haven't had any significant problems, and the software packages are (for the most part, KDE3 and GNOME 2 are not there yet) up to date.
Heffel
Expert Java EE Consulting
Can anyone explain these statements? Suits lie? Non-suited people don't? But it's okay for suited liars (Hewlett-Packard is no more exempt than any other huge corporation) to turn around and sell, oh, sorry, "distribute" the non-suited non-liars products? I hope this guy doesn't write code for a living!
Because it states the following:
Of course, Debian itself has some work to do before it becomes LSB-compliant. For one thing, the LSB has decided that RPM 3 will be the standard Linux package manager, so the Debian group will need to either change the standard or support RPM in some way before it can be considered standards-compliant. Debian developers have been looking at what specifically needs to be done to reach LSB compliance, and Collins says that it is a priority.
Debian support RPM packages using ALIEN. And I think it can convert and support LSB RPM packages as well. Isn't this enough for being compliant of this part of the standard?
And does anyone know what this is about?
When the makers of the BRU backup utility, which is proprietary software, tried to get the distribution to make some changes that would allow their software to run more easily on Debian, "We were pretty much ignored," remembers Tim Jones, president of The TOLIS Group, the makers of BRU.
What changes were they proposing?
Or am I wrong? Is Debian really that much better?
mogorific carpentry experiments
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.
Use athlon builder or pentium builder, it will compile optimized binaries
Doing so automatically would be nice
Having dinner --- oh whats up on /. -- get on the net -- loading -- loading -- HEY its the Debian logo -- woody is out!!! -- loading -- loading -- oh bugger...
I can't believe
The difference being that Debian users often spend much of their spare time making non-Debian users nauseous with their holier-than-thou dribble.
This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it. - Dorothy Parker
Oh, wait. If you're a Debian user, you're probably at least three years behind, so you may have to upgrade some python packages, get the rhn packages, stuff like that. Here is a place to start if you're still running 6.2.
and you can rpm with http:// as the source. or ftp if you prefer. that may require you to rtfm, though....ouch!
HP is going with Debian because they hired Bruce Perens. While you're busy slamming commercial linux distributions, it is important to remember that the tools you count on every day have developers, and many of those developers need to eat, house, and clothe themselves, among other things. As someone mentioned in another post, HP has hired some of the Debian people. Certain other commercial linux vendors also have hired people. Kernel people, gcc people, Apache people, etc, etc, etc.
Has Debian bothered signing their packages yet? Or has gpg not made it into their distro?
Non-commercial Linux distributions like Gentoo or Debian are impressive. They have more package than most commercial distros, they are actively maintainer, they have an amazing packaging system, they are free and everyone can put his finger in the pie.
.
But *commercial* distros are really important. Why? Because companies like SuSE or RedHat have a marketing force. Without them, a lot of companies would never have heard about Linux. Just like a lot of other free operating systems, Linux would have been something designed by geeks, and for geeks. SuSE, RedHat, etc. give an important professional aspect to Linux. Thanks to them, some hardware vendors gave specs or developped Linux drivers. Thanks to them, web plugins like Flash are supported on Linux. Thanks to them and their money, Linux has been ported to Intel and AMD 64 bits architectures. Thanks to them, any dummy can buy a SuSE package with a comprehensive printed manual, everything on CD's and DVD's, and get technical support.
Sure, once you are familar with Unix/Linux, you can easily use any distro, commercial or not, or even switch to BSD. But I guess a lot of people would never have installed Linux/Unix on their computer if the only thing they was given was http://www.debian.org/ or http://www.openbsd.org/
So please stop bashing commercial Linux distributions. Linux would never have been what it is nowadays without them.
{{.sig}}
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
I've been using Gentoo for approximately 3 days. I've dabbled in Debian, flirted with Red Hat, but generally used Slackware.
Gentoo has everything I liked about Slack, simple install, text based configuration, *very* simple package management, and none of the things I disliked about Debian -- generic builds, and the possibility of apt-get freakin' out.
In Slackware land, everything gets compiled (unless using the RPM hack), and the result is a very fast system, that was built on your hardware and for your hardware. Apps, daemons run noticebly faster, and the resulting binary is less likely to hicup.
However, Gentoo is by far the most impressive operating system I've ever used. Within hours of the new KDE 3.1alpha1 being released, there was a Gentoo package. Sure, it linked to thousands of dependancies, and would take half a day to compile, but packages can be updated very *very* easily, intead of Debian's methadology where they provide binaries which are supposed to work on generic Debian systems. The good thing^tm about source code is that it can be compiled by any computer which has the libraries, and the modules installed, why anyone would consider using binary package management over source boggles my mind. Expect the Gentoo userbase to skyrocket.
So, no thank you. Give me a command line to install my operating system, then give me a compiler and some friggin' source...
For I use Gentoo, and I am a power user.
dmarien
Yes, HP does use Debian but didn't Redhat just sign a big deal with HP? I prep some of their computers for trade shows and when a customer asks for Linux I use HP Linux which is based on Redhat 7.2 right now. I also think that they even use a 3rd Linux distribution but I can't recall what it is or what they use it on. I know HP uses different Linux distributions for different platforms. For a little while I was using Debian on the 2nd Generation Itanium's but then switched back to Redhat about a month ago.
I was quite appalled to read this...
I guess the insightful wording is yours...
"I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them." -- George H. W. Bush
Probably the coolest feature of the Debian distribution is its package management system.
Probably the only "cool" feature of the Debian distribution is its package management system.
What else in the distro could you call "cool"? And is it really that "cool"?
-... ---
I've used Debian a couple of times, and I must say it is one of the better linux distributions. However, I don't use it on any of my machines. The reason for this is the Debian Installer. It is a pain the butt to get the thing installed. And the benefits for doing so don't outweigh the horrors of getting it installed.
If you took the Mandrake installer. Mandrakes up-to-dateness (stable debian isn't current enough), and mandrakes cool graphical tools and combine them with debians apt-get and overall os quality, I think you would arrive at somethign very close to the best linux distribution possible.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
First rule, Keep It Simple. I'll save you time and shout: SLACKWARE. Get it?
Point 1 - only if you have a questioning community is it harder to lie to them. The majority of people I know in most communities pretty much just accept what is being offered.
Point 2 - reread the initial stuff. 'suits'. Lumping people together as 'suits' and 'hackers' is pretty stupid, which was the poster's point.
Point 3 - I have tried using Debian. There was not one decent IM package. The AOL deb package didn't work. GAIM crashed every 3 minutes. And on and on. I would apt-get install or upgrade a package and it would crash. The answer? "Try it again in an hour or so - you're using unstable.". Of course I'm using 'unstable' cause that's where the fairly recents stuff is.
Another set of fantastic experiences with Debian involved apt-get upgrading some packages. I had to repeatedly repeat the process because the first few times it would just sporadically die in the middle of the process. Answers from debian people? 'go back to windows' or 'just keep doing it - sometimes you have to run the command a few times before it works'. Excellent attitude for something supposedly stable and 'lie' proof. Is that 'truism' plastered anywhere on the debian site? "might need to run apt-get upgrade 4 times for some packages" as a warning label might be nice.
The fact is that it's not really any better or worse - on the whole - from other distributions. Debian people need to get other this perception of superiority.
creation science book
I've been using debian for several years and really find it to be a stellar distribution. I love apt-get and the fact that it has been a solid system (even though I'm running unstable). My only gripe is that the install system and process for configuring X could be improved greatly. My roommate just tried installing Debian and configuring X (and getting nvidia drivers to work). His response was that maybe he should really go back to windows! OUCH! I Downloaded a few other distributions and he was much happier with his experience with all of them. (SuSE Mandrake and RedHat)
Don't get me wrong, I love deb and will keep using it, however, getting it to be a bit for friendly to the first time user couldn't hurt either.
Thanks, I didn't want to burn the karma to flame him, so I'm glad you did it first. For a people who call themselves 'educated' or 'L337' or whatever, why is it that linux users assume that their distro of choice is the only only one with even the simplest of features? Just because *you* can't update the system effectively with rpm, doesn't mean it can't do it. We're all glad that you've found nirvana with debian - kudos to you. I personally prefer mandrake - I like my linux, but I like it to work pretty much out of the box, and debian hasn't done that for me in years. I learned linux on debian, but it refuses to cooperate with my new hardware, and I don't really feel the need to spend weeks getting it to work when mandrake just installs and goes. So for all the twits out there saying 'redhat sucks because rpm doesn't work the same way as dpkg/apt', maybe it would if you'd put down the torch and pitchfork and follow your own advice - RTFM.
do not read this line twice.
Micrsoft just called, they say Slashdot violated their copyright on favouritism, biased journalism and immoral propaganda towards other OSes. They are now deploying Special Agent Ballmer to sodomize Taco for this. Have a nice day.
Hate me!
Why not write a user friendly installer.
And use the debian system for hte actual apps
If Linux doesnt get onto millions and millions of desktops soon, be ready to kiss it goodbye in the future.
I doubt that. OpenBSD isn't on thousands and thousands of desktops, but it's still being developed. Linux hasn't been on thousands and thousands of desktops, and it's still getting developed. Just because it's not mainstream doesn't mean people will abandon it.
Maybe Linux shouldn't be for the masses. Ever think of that? Maybe a new OS should be developed from scratch that will be integrated, secure, easy to use, etc... Maybe the problem isn't that Linux is bad, it's just that we (myself included) keep thinking about the same old ideas of how an OS should work. Maybe a new structure should be created? How would that work? I haven't the foggiest.
Anyway, my point was really just that Linux doesn't have to become mainstream to live. It'll continue to be developed by the people who developed it *before* it got noticed. Some people use it for the right reason, you know. They're not trying to screw Microsoft. They're not trying to live the "Free Software" religion. They use it and develop it because it's fun for them.
Remember what it was like to have fun with a computer?
The GPL makes software more like your mom. Free and open to all.
I use RH. I am RH biased. Caldera sounds good, but typically the only way you can find the quirks is to install it yourself.
Without having to install each one, I'd like to get an idea for which distro is right for me.
Can someone point me to a nonbiased article about the pros and cons of using the major linux distros.
-techwolf
I don't do this for karma, I do it for cash. It's much better.
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.
Gentoo is sort of like a how shall we say.. more breed edge Debian?
Well not quite it's not actually based on Debian as far as I can see but the distro does follow the same social contract.
I like it it's neat I don't have to deal with dependency mess and it beats Mandrake hands down for stability.
You are almost right about the morons.
You are one of the 98%!
Ahh - My eye!
The doctor said I'm not supposed to get Slashdot in it!
Actually, according to Debian, they have two logos; one can be used by anyone for anything, while the other is under the "Debian Official Use Logo License," which is thus:
Copyright (c) 1999 Software in the Public Interest
- This logo may only be used if:
- the product it is used for is made using a documented procedure as published on www.debian.org (for example official CD-creation)
- official approval is given by Debian for its use in this purpose
- May be used if an official part of debian (decided using the rules in I) is part of the complete product, if it is made clear that only this part is officially approved
- We reserve the right to revoke a license for a product
Permission has been given to use the official logo on clothing (shirts, hats, etc) as long as they are made by a Debian developer and not sold for profit.Evidently, they too want a logo that can't be misused, although I haven't seen it much anywhere...
true && more || less
... and yes, most of th etimes I find de debian distro as being the best or at least just as good as others. As always there are more things to consider then just the quality of the distro.
:-))
We now had a couple of customers where we installed several different distros. Our favorite is debian, mainly because of it's apt tool. Nice and easy remote updates whitout the hassle to register for updates or even paying extra to update more then 1 system per account. (like redhat, major drawback IMHO)
However, debian isn't everything. At this moment I'm holding my breath and I hope my workstation doesn't need a reinstall. The potato cd's don't have the 2.4 kernel which I need for the hardware and I haven't taken the time to make my own install cd. (it's about time)
Due to this we have switched to RH at our regular work. (oh, and the fact that IBM support is required and the other 3 distros they support are completely unknown or unwanted here)
The install we did last weekend was RH 7.3. With it's drawbacks it was still the best distro for the environment. We even adviced to have them migrate the mail setup to an NT box, as they only have windows knowledge and we can't give support round the clock for updating the mailsetup. (they had a home-brew virtual pop system)
So when you decide on what distro to install, think of more then just what distro is best. To be honest, there is no perfect distro, only a good one for that specific job. (it's the same as with everything else in the world
BTW if we have the choice and debian is as good as any for the job, we prefer debian. I love the remote update functionality, ever distro should have one. (for free)
... Wenn ist das Nunstruck git und Slotermeyer? Ja!... Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput!
Rubbish. Linus Torvalds is the soul of Linux. Everyone else is just a hanger-on. Debian represents a particular political movement. Linus made Linux to "scratch an itch", not for a political statement.
Please point the next person to complain about Debian's slow releases here. The point remains: slow releases are still a good thing. For anyone with basic UNIX skills, the major updates are just a minor convenience. And each full distribution upgrade carries unnecessary risks.
Says the RIAA: When you EQ, you're stealing bass!
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.
I diasagree. The soul of Linux lives in every person who choses to disagree with the evil norm and go another way.
But I don't understand the Debian/Redhat rift; sure, Redhat keeps a bastardized form of the kernel (not virgin like the ones from kernel.org) but you can install it in seconds, literally. What's this about corporate lies?
There's even apt for Redhat; see http://www.apt.freshrpms.net. It's wonderful, and you don't have to learn another distro (and fight the notorious install scripts) to get that kind of quality.
But anything that puts Linux (of any kind) on desktops as simply and easily as possible is a win for the movement. No?
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
Aside: I note in advance that the people who make Debian have no obligation to cater to *anyone* besides themselves, and that they actually do make the many and commendable efforts they do toward friendly usability is way above and beyond the call of duty, kudos and thanks to them.
(Another reason I've only tried occasionally is lack of bandwidth; now that I have a faster connection, apt-get is the wonderful experience it's cracked up to be.)
I do now have a working debian system which has opened my eyes to the reason people like to actually *use* Debian so much -- all other things aside, apt-get is rad rad rad. (Yes, Mandrake has the very nice urpmi as well, deserves high praise for simplifying things on that side of my desktop, but the breadth of available deb packages is astounding.) I've not tried the Red Hat up2date equivalent or a lot of other auto-update tools, but so far, apt-get is the most impressive
Getting the darn system *on* though -- that's something I don't that many people are stubborn enough to do, and that's a shame.
The problem with most computer documentation (Debian included, and perhaps an example to keep in mind, but not exclusive) is that the doc. writer is unable or unwilling to repeatedly step all the way through the mental path his directions offer and consider possible missteps in order to build in new guideposts as appropriate. If man pages are all you ever need, great, more power to you, but I thank and appreciate everyone who's ever created a step-by-step tutorial for getting particular aspects of system operation to work.
There are now quite a few of these walk-throughs for free software in general, Linux in particular, Debian in especially particular, and that's a credit to their authors.
If I could magically wake up and find the perfect Debian install disk set under my head (let's say CD-R, DVD opens up too many other good possibilities), I'd like to see a Disk One with an (optionally) graphical installer, perhaps the Progeny woody installer disk I saw mentioned on Debian Planet, and enough of a complete system to run even without downloading anything else, and a Disk Two chock full of tutorials, case-studies, trouble-shooting guides, etc. (And by case studies I mean something like this: "How I turned my Debian system into a PVR," or "One solution to serving thin clients from a Debian-based server." That is, instructive, real-life descriptions of how to approach certain problems which don't need to claim universality.)
Things it would be great to see explained with screenshots, "type exactly this" instructions and human-friendly language might include:
- "How to get DVD playback working" (which I'll try next month when I have my debian system, my body, and my new DVD drive in the same room again)
- "Getting 3D Acceleration on your Debian system"
- "How to set up your sources list for a mixed stable / testing / unstable system"
- "Controlling radio-linked vehicles with Debian."
Note -- exccept for that last one, these (paraphrased) are all from real and no doubt redundant tutorials published around the web on personal home pages and on Debian-centric websites. All I'm suggesting is how pleasant it would be for 650MB worth of helpful, explicit, comprehensible, friendly documention to be available in one big well-indexed chunk.As long as the first disk got far enough to create a working system with X and a browser, a nice documentation disk could be read and used from the desktop without even needing a network connection.
And yes, I am talking about many things well-collected by the Debian Documentation Project (http://www.debian.org/doc/ddp)
and one I just found today, the Debian Home Network Documentation Project (http://bogmog.sourceforge.net/), just saying that a "reference" disk somewhat akin to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy would be a huge benefit to new users, which I will most assuredly continue to be for some time into the future. (The HG2G remember did *not* require a current network connection, though I'm unclear on whether it needed a renewable power source to read
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Everybody goes on and on about the wonders of apt-get, as if it were the only good thing about Debian. (By the way, you guys should be using aptitude now. Aptitude tracks "auto" packages which have been only been installed to meet dependencies.)
Debian's most valuable asset is its devotion to its users. We are the only GNU/Linux distribution to work on this many architectures. Debian is the testing ground for non-i386 XFree86.
Debian is also invaluable to the developer community because the Project submits bugs upstream! Yes, when a package does not compile on PA-RISC because the code is poor and/or non-portable, a bug report (and likely a patch) is forwarded upstream. Not only does this fix a lot of bugs, but it improves software quality across all architectures. Plus, system administration across the Debian platform is extremely consistent.
Debian considers itself the Universal Operating System. That is why projects such as Debian NetBSD, Debian OpenBSD, Debian FreeBSD and even Debian GNU/Hurd are in active development. I know the GNU/Hurd port has been doing a very good job of making sure programs are truly POSIX compliant.
== I am not Me.
Anyone can lie. Suits are "money motivated" to lie. That's the American Corporate Culture way.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
What text? As far as I can tell the page renders nicely (Mozilla 1.0)
It's simple. Say you're starting with a set of stable CDs. So:
And that's it. I started with a set of potato CDs, and there has never been a trace of XFree86 3.x on my system. Version 4.whatever runs fine, the automatic XF86Config-4 configuration did a fairly decent job, and I'm upgrading with the greatest of ease. :-)
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
I've been trying to install Gentoo off a dialup connnection for the last week. I think it's just you. Every time some package along the way to KDE won't compile. Always a different one, though. At least it's interesting.
Put identity in the browser.
No, it's SID. After the psycho toy-mutilating boy in Toy Story.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Off the top of my head:
- Non-commercial: check.
- Suit-free: I believe so.
- Social contract: check.
- Standards-based: check.
- Stable: AFAIK, Gentoo is just as stable as Debian, if not more so.
- apt: As much as I think apt is a great idea, Portage is better, IMHO.
Did I miss anything?"Anything is better than IE, and you can quote me on that." -- Wil Wheaton.
all i have to say about this post is:
Ben is an idiot
you damn debian user you ;-)
"If you love someone, set them free. If they come home, set them on fire." - George Carlin
It's good to see that you gave Debian a chance, but you admit you were asleep at the wheel.
I and other professionals had moved on to something more trustworthy
This does not sound very professional to me. You leech off the Debian archives without keeping your own copy? You expect them to keep a copy available on the net for future use? How much did you pay for this service?
It makes me wonder what profession you think you are practicing.
Ah, seems to be a mozilla 1.1a bug, there's a raft of bugs about it.
Hewlett-wha? Perhaps you mean "HP" (soon to be known as "Compaq-Fiorina").
(http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/bu siness/companies/hewlett_packard/3282149.htm)
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
I'm not knocking Debian, I just couldn't get it working on my PC. I had XFree86 working with my older ATI video card, but I couldn't get my new Nvidia recognized. Setting up the scsi emulation for my CD-RW wasn't hard, so that worked fine. But I just could not manage to get the RTL8139 driver for my ethernet card working.
I'm sure half the Slashdot population considers those problems as having trivial fixes, but they weren't trivial for me. Red Hat 7.3 handled everything on the first try, I only had to handle the disk partitioning. So, Red Hat it is!
I said it above, I'll say it here...
I would much rather run Debian. I agree with their philosophies, I like the variety of packages, I appreciate the work they put into the project.
But the last time I tried to install Woody, in June, I had three problems. It didn't configure scsi emulation so I could use my CD burner. Xfree86 would not start (I'm 99.44% I have the correct video driver installed). I could not get my RealTek ethernet card recognized.
The first problem was a trivial fix, I just read the man pages and got it working. I gave up on the other two after a few hours of fruitless work. Red Hat 7.3 took care of all three on its own during install.
I'm not saying Debian should be more user friendly. It's not commercial, they don't need to be user friendly. I am saying that until Debian is user friendly, a lot of people, even Linux users, just won't be able to get it working.
They not want to outsource the Linux support...
Case in point. I love and use Perl for much of my work. I want and will build it from source. But if I want X-Windows, GNOME, and much, much more installed via RPMS from my Redhat CDs, I have to install the Perl RPMS. This is unacceptable to me. I recognize that RPMS make some things easy for Joe User, but they often make the basics impossible for me.
Tarballs are dead they say. Long live tarballs!
The more common people try to make common sense, the less sense it makes.
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.
I'd be more willing to consider Debian if it wasn't for the fact that the last distro they were willing to call "stable" is getting quite old now. I have to pick between "recent" and "stable" - I can't have both. And that is the main reason I've been staying away from Debian.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
make
make install
breaks the usefulness of using a packaging system (whether the system is apt, rpm, or whatever).
If you want to build from source and install custom software and expect to still be able to use your packaging system, you should build your own packages to install instead of using make install. When building your packages, you then tag the package as need be to fill the same dependencies as the stock package.
I have 2 PCs, both 500-MHz (so not too old). Red Hat 5.2 and 6.2 both install perfectly on both machines. Debian installs perfectly in console mode. But I cannot for the life of me get Debian (Potato or Woody) to properly run X on either. If anyone has a pointer to a "really damn good HOWTO" for this, I'd love to see it.
The aptitude(1) tool does nice things with "Recommends" dependencies. Suppose package foo recommends foo-extra. When you install foo, aptitude installs foo-extra... but remembers that it was installed from a Recommends dependency. When you later remove foo, aptitude will also remove foo-extra!
aptitude is ncurses-based. It lets you interactively search and browse your packages database, looking at what you do and do not have installed. I discovered that Debian has the rogue game (the precursor to nethack) by searching for the keyword "game" in aptitude, for example. (rogue is in the package "bsdgames-nonfree", by the way.)
aptitude isn't perfect. There have been times where aptitude was convinced a package was uninstallable, but I went to a command line and did "apt-get install " and it installed just fine. And there have been a few times where I went to install a package, and aptitude was convinced it needed to remove a whole ton of packages I wanted. So I do sometimes still use apt-get... but by far I spend the most time running aptitude.
I'm looking forward to a nice GNOME tool, one that will do everything aptitude does plus show some sort of tree diagram to show package dependencies. Meanwhile, gnome-apt is a poor second place after aptitude.
In summary, if you use Debian, you need and want to use aptitude. Highly recommended.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
My only complaint about Debain is that the install can be painful, especially to those used to more graphical oriented tools.
I am happy to be able to tell you about the Progeny Graphical Installer. Graphical and friendly, and even has an ncurses mode for those times when you have an oddball graphics card and you can't get the graphical install to work. It's very nice!
As a bonus, it leverages the XFree86 project. When XFree86 adds support for a new card, PGI inherits the support. Compare with the Corel installer, which had its own graphics code... it could choke on new cards (such as a GeForce) and since it didn't even have a fallback text install, Corel Linux was uninstallable with certain graphics cards!
Anyway, the ISO file for burning a CD is about 94MB. It installs a working base system and then can use the net to install up-to-date packages.
http://hackers.progeny.com/pgi/
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Of course, Debian itself has some work to do before it becomes LSB-compliant. For one thing, the LSB has decided that RPM 3 will be the standard Linux package manager
.deb with .rpm
You can apt-get install rpm if you want. But I hope debian doesn't replace
IMHO I think LSB is wrong to specify this, for what should it matter to a running app what package files are used, unless that app is involved with the package system.
apt isn't just for debian, apt4rpm allows you to apt-get install rpm's just like you apt-get install deb's for debian..
/everything/), a good desktop (KDE3), and the wonderful world of apt.
The up-to-date packages of redhat, with decent configuration tools (not that I can't do it on my own, but I've come to the point that I really don't care to manually do
Since apt isn't debian exclusive anymore, I can't really find any reason to run debian =p
Just because you disagree doesn't mean it's not true.
Why did this story get posted to slashdot? It was written in March, which is when I read it the first time.
Thanks for the tip.
I probably was a user at that time. I thought the libc5 to libc6 upgrade was a nightmare. It's been a while but I seem to remember formatting my disk and starting from scratch to recover.
I just want to make it clear that a professional will be more thorough and responsible to their customer. That is what they are being paid for. Anyone can ask for 'money for nothin' ...
If you read the interview, it becomes apparent that Ian is a fan of dselect, so much so that he'd much rather use it than apt, or even some of the newer, nicer tools like aptitude.
I've read at least a few times that apt was never meant to be directly used by people, and that a frontend was always intended. The problem is that so many people hated dselect, that they just went and used apt instead. Ian doesn't like this, and thinks people should use tools like dselect and aptitude as their actual interface, and I'd agree with him. I personally despise using apt-get unless I have to, because having a GUI or ncurses frontend makes life a lot easier.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
They should have called it "GNUPro" or something, and made it clear from the version string that this was not based on an FSF release. There never was an official version 2.96 release of gcc
In fact, the GCC steering commite has decided to release a GCC 3.2 which is just 3.1 plus the ABI bug fixes. The hope is that GNU/Linux/BSD distributors will standardize on the 3.2 ABI, and that no more ABI bugs will pop up.
...was actually the largest problem. While the new inliner is much better from a conceptual point of view, the heuristics wasn't changed appropriately. The result was that far too much was inlined, since the new inliner was able to inline far more. Making compilation extremely slow, and even making the code slower (due to cache misses).
And much C++ code depend on a good inliner, i.e. if you want vector to be an alternative to C arrays, the access calls must be inlined.
Far the largest standard conformance problem in 2.95 was the C++ standard library (v2), which was developed long before the standard. A standard conforming library (v3) was under development, but was not included in 2.96.
So while gcc 2.96 was close to 3.0 from a C point of view, it was much closer to 2.95 from a C++ point of view.
My apologies, I misremembered. It is possible I was thinking of the 0.x series that preceded the release of Toy Story.
I'll keep my SuSe distro thank you much.
I gather you have never bothered to look at either
http://www.debian.org/support
or
http://www.debian.org/consultants/
, since your points are more than covered there. (Have you?)
precompiled binaries, bleh.
forced use of tcpwrappers, bleh
too large minimum install, bleh
still distributing static libs in the packages, bleh
another words, bleh!