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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.
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
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?
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
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.
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.
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).
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.
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
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}}
"Or am I wrong? Is Debian really that much better?"
... lots of alternatives.
Debian pioneered the apt-get "upgradability from the get-go" idea. There exists _grab_ for RPM, up2date,
ISTM that nowadays, these distributions only differ in quality assurance (ensuring that all SRPMs build with `rpm --rebuild ' directly without error, ensuring that security fixes are consistently backported rather than new features introduced) rather than anything technical.
All binary distributions suck, anyway. There's no need to be either behind the times like Debian/unstable (lack of XFree86-4.2 even in the Unstable tree, a wait of several months before a particular bug in psi/libqt appears), nor to spend all your time downloading 9Mb packages of mozilla every day just because someone upstream changed a compile option.
Oh, and today's experiences in dealing with spam on debian mailing lists have put me *right* off them as well. No attempts made upstream to deal with some wanker who sent 22 separate mails to the 2 lists to which I subscribe, and instead, when I automate reporting this specific spam to Razor, it gets branded "ridiculous". Too spam-friendly by far.
That'll be why I host a mirror for another linux distribution's "ports" system, and why I run FreeBSD on the notebook then...
~Tim
--
Rushing on down to the circle of the turn
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 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
red-carpet.
Be kind. There are too many mean people out there already.
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!
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'm not quite sure where that quote came from, but it's an interesting look at some of the more .. enthusiastic .. OS supporters.
When you have supporters such as IBM's Linux program manager, Dan Frye saying "We think Debian is the most righteous distribution," and advocates referred to as "evangalists", it's ceased being a distribution to some people and started to become a religion.
Of course, every distribution (and general operating system for that matter) have their more fanatical supporters.
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!
Some people have better things to do than to recompile every frigging package. I once tried to compile XFree (back in the 3.x days), and it took me about 24 hours.
On my system, I have 565 packages. I don't even want to think about how long that would take to compile.
Je ne parle pas francais.
Why not write a user friendly installer.
And use the debian system for hte actual apps
I was quite appalled to read this:
Where did you read this? It wasn't in the linked article, and Google didn't help me at all.
Talk about putting words into the mouths of your opponents.
deus does not exist but if he does
Ya wanna bet that by the time you see KDE 3.1 (alpha or not), that i'll be done compiling?
dmarien
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.
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 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!
Hewlett Compaquard also has a commercial relationship with SuSE. The Debian news article suggested that they were chosen as the development platform internally. The two statements are not inconsistent.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
I ran a stage3 install, but followed the docs as if I had performed a stage 1 (the 16MB ISO wouldn't boot for me!). Anyway -- overnight, and by mid day it was completed. PII 300, /w 320 MB RAM & 18GB SCSI.
:)
Freakin' great so far... now if only I could find out how to get openssh keys generated I'd be able to administer it from work... I literally just drove home, typed 'emerge kde', then drove back
dmarien
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.
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
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)
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.
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
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!
Thanks d00d. That was a great reply, hopefully that wasn't copied and pasted from somewhere :)
i was talking about my personal desktop in my room
i'm sure that gentoo can easily check against updates for apache/sendmail/php/mysql/qmail/etc... and automatically compile them. yeah it might take some time, but honestly, if it's a production box you're looking at some impressive hardware under the hood and high clockspeeds, i don't see compile time for these (relatively) small projects being a reason against source package management.
and because i'm only *very* familliar with slack, i'm not sure about other OSes, especially bsd variants (i have no experience). But ports, and the portage system came from bsd variants, no?
and bsd, is the most widely used unix variant in production systems, no?
if it's good for the market leader of OSes on production servers, a source based package management portage system is good enough for my little desktop
also, i heard somewhere that the package management system used by gentoo can be easily modified to support binaries, and that a few people are working on getting it stable, so if that's true what reasons still exist for using debian instead of gentoo...?
one more thing... i found it funny that you pointed at slack's age of 6 months when you're defending debian. they haven't released a new verison while i've even been using linux.
anyway -- good well writen reply, thanks.
dmarien
Thanks for the comments, not copied or pasted I promise :-)
:-) [HHOS!;)]
:-).
:-) Even though the 'release' version number doesn't change updates through package management are constantly meaning an 'apt-get dist-upgrade' can update every single program on your system to the newest release, which is just unbeliveably cool :-)
i'm sure that gentoo can easily check against updates for apache/sendmail/php/mysql/qmail/etc.
Hmm cool, that's sounds interesting, I'll look into that.
Re; BSD
Ack, I think the BSD ports system is very good (particularly the way it automatically fetches source dependancies and complies them). This solves quite a lot of the problems I belive exist when you don't have package management. It's note quite package management and I prefer Solaris or Linux to BSD for the most part.
It's pretty popular and I think most BSD users are more experienced than Linux users (just because BSD get's less media attention and has less prevolence on the desktop) which also helps to negate some of the negative aspects of having to perform manual upgrades.
I don't have any hard figures to hand, but I don't think *BSD is more common than Linux - Linux get's a lot of media attention as a poster child (BSD is more of a grumpy uncle shaking it's fists at the young Linux upstarts, which pretty much reflects the BSD [middle age men, with long beards] vrs. Linux [young 'hip' geeks in their teens/mid twenties] users & developers
On one hand, Hotmail and Yahoo! rely heavily on FreeBSD (the most common of the BSD's) but then other site's like Google use Linux.
Most organisations have nothing like the quality of engineers at Hotmail, Yahoo! or Google though, and I think most installations would suffer if they didn't have 'easier' to manage systems like Red Hat or Solaris with simple package management and easy upgradeability (simply due to the fact that many Unix engineers or consultants are not as professionaly competant as they probably should be).
As it happens we run FreeBSD for our product in house and I am trying to switch to slowly it to Linux quitely so I can run L.I.D.S (lids.org) or PitBull LX because until Trusted BSD reaches maturity it's simply not able to be as secure technically.
if it's good for the market leader of OSes on production servers, a source based package management portage system is good enough for my little desktop
Well it's not the market leader, but it's still popular in the Unix world even if I don't like it as a production system, but yep, it's definately good enough for you desktop (and your right, if your compiling software it will be faster than a generic binary, but of course packages can be source too that way you get the best of both worlds !
also, i heard somewhere that the package management system used by gentoo can be easily modified to support binaries, and that a few people are working on getting it stable, so if that's true what reasons still exist for using debian instead of gentoo...?
Hard to say, I guess, realistically, the only thing (given that your using it on a desktop) is that it would be an easier life for you if used Debian due it's popularity - installing a wide range of packages is very simple and easy with apt-get (I like it so much I even use fink, which is 'apt-get' for Mac OS X).
On the other hand, if you want the latest and greatest of anything, you'll probably end up having compile things anway, so I guess it depends what your preferences is. One thing is that you can learn a lot more about how to solve problems by compiling things yourself. Though it's good to have knowledge of both Debian and Red Hat package management for a commercial environment.
one more thing... i found it funny that you pointed at slack's age of 6 months when you're defending debian. they haven't released a new verison while i've even been using linux.
Ah because difference being the updates to tree's (e.g. security, unstable) are daily/or as needed
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.
The current naming convention is for the Debian 2.x series. The Debian 1.x series had a different naming convention. Presumably Debian 3.x will have also have a new naming convention. Hopefully, the 3.x series will arrive prior to running through the names of all the characters from Toy Story.
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
d00d,
in debian, apt-get apache.
in gentoo, emerge apache.
in debian, apt-get links:
downloads and installs links (text based browser)
in gentoo, emerge links:
downloads links source code, all dependancies (source too), downloads XFree86 4.2.0 (if X doesn't exist), downloads the X add-on for links, and boom, in one command, I downloaded, configured, built, and installed a text based browser, X server, and a graphical add-on to make a text based browser a graphical one.
that just happened to be the first app i 'emerged', and i nearly shit my pants when I saw how powerfull ports is.
that's pretty powerfull.
and there's a command to upgrade the entire gentoo distrobution. i didn't need to do it, since I performed a stage3 install, but it's something insanely simple such as 'emerge rsync'.
gentoo rocks d00d, it'll take over, trust me. it has the absolute fastest growing userbase of any distro. in months it became in the top 7 distros, and it's still pretty much beta pre-production.
give it some time
dmarien
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
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.
A Gentoo Stage 3 install is a 100MB cdrom ISO, and you don't need to download more than 10Mb during install.
dmarien
precompiled binaries, bleh.
forced use of tcpwrappers, bleh
too large minimum install, bleh
still distributing static libs in the packages, bleh
another words, bleh!