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Two Reviews of Debian 3.0
FrankNFurter writes "Debian Planet features a review of Debian 3.0 from a user's perspective. Time for a reality check, debianistas." And twstdr00t writes "Linuxwatch.org has posted their review of Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 Woody. 'The package managment system is nice and easy to use. But the lack of good configuration and installation takes that all away from Debian.'"
An unflattering review from debianplanet. Nice. Maybe this will actually motivate some of the debian guys to fix the distribution. I really enjoy debian when it works, and when the software is moderately up to date. I used to use the unstable version, but even that started getting where it uses way out of date software.
As a long time debian user i must say that i would never want to go back to other packaging system (for now at least)... But when it comes to trying to install a _NEW_ computer for some friends, i usually try debian first and since i can't stay there to tweak everything for hours (which i would do at home since once done your system is constently kept up to date for years), i usually have to throw a redhat or mandrake at them :-/
conclusion: Debian rocks if you can get it installed and know linux well... maybe not the best thing for starters unfortunetaly..(not wanting to scare anyone ... not too fast ;-)
the first AC bitchy nay-sayer didn't even bother to read the article
here is a quote from the first paragraph:
"I really want Debian to succeed. I want to use it daily, and recommend it to my friends. But I can't do that right now and I think it's important people understand why."
maybe you can get someone to read it for you (illiterate fuckwit)
The article does discuss the Progeny Graphical Installer, which is being included in the next release. The last time I used this installer was roughly a year and a half ago. I could install a progeny 1.0 system in 25 minutes flat with this installer.
/etc/apt/sources.list to reflect the new base and downloading the updated packages.
Yes, the current installer stinks, and it needs much work to catch up to Mandrake, Red Hat and SuSE. But to move from the progeny to potato to woody releases was as simple as changing my
However, I have not had to reinstall my primary system in a year and a half. I cannot say that for any other operating system. The stable archives work well together.
Debian: not for newbies. Higher learning curve than others. Worth learning if you want more control over your system.
The significant problems we face cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them. -Einstein
but I like debian the most. I don't knwo but I feel more comfortable with debian than I ever have with any other distro. Its just feels solid and reliable. I likes it. It just tastes good.
and we've had this discussion before about debian not being for everyone. well linux isn't for everyone either. OS X isn't for everyone, windows isn't for everyone, AmigaOS isn't for everyone. use what you like. I likes debian.
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Debian isn't really ment to be the distro for the masses. It is a bitch to set up, and doesn't come with all the bells and whistles Jane Somebody will be looking for in their OS. However, I feel it is the truest to Linux's roots and it is an incredible system, if you have the necesarry skill set.
I have never thought Debian was a typical OS for the typical user. Consider for a moment what Redhat has done for to their distribution. They want it to be as easy to install as windows. And to their credit they have come close, but Debian has, IMHO, and always will be the an atypical OS for the atypical user.
That is not to say a bit of spit and polish on UI/configuration side wouldn't hurt, but then again I know that GeForce is an Nvidia product and no amount of rebranding by Creative Labs is going to change that (with regards to my X config). The same is true for a lot of hardware.
When you think about it the only difference between linux (and particularly Debian) and windows is that windows presumes (and Redhat is trying to emulate) that the user is an idiot (especially with regards to hardware) and Debian does not.
Red Hat's got their Red Hat Network upgrade service. It's a lot like Windows Update with XP - it'll tell you when updates are available, and you'll have the option to download them. It works well. I have personally intalled apt-get (for RPM) and I've fallen in love with it. But it is not an official Red Hat apt-get. You can grab it from FreshRPMS.
Reading how people think that the debian installer is the worst. Those people clearly have not installed OpenBSD... But hey, for them its a security feature, only an expert can install it!
And I still use it. But it's really annoying now that common non-free applications (pine, elm) aren't even in the distribution anymore.
I have a feeling someone will mod me as "troll" for this, but so be it...
I do not understand why so many of these so-called "reviewers" cannot take the time to use a simple spelling and grammar checker. The review from LinuxPlanet was written by the webmaster of LinuxPlanet, yet it contained several grammatical gaffes, including use of "it's" instead of "its" and some misspellings (one of which, "managment", made its way to the front page of Slashdot.)
This seems to be a growing trend in certain review sites. It really bothers me that some of the foremost open-source sites seem to have such a problem with grammar and spelling. This reflects badly not only on those sites, but on open-source and free software itself.
Proper spelling and grammar may be unimportant to you personally, but it makes a lot of people view your site as unprofessional. If you want respect, you need to focus on good grammar and spelling -- or, at the very least, running your articles through a grammar and spelling checker before they are posted. (With that respect comes several bonuses, as well: great goodies such as advertising dollars, free software and hardware to review, and more.)
The fact that most of these sites don't bother to check spelling and grammar before posting "reviews" is one more reason for me to not feel any sympathy when they need those advertising/subscription dollars to stay alive. If you make the effort to use proper grammar and spelling, I'll reward you with visits and subscription money. If you don't, I won't, and neither will most corporations looking for a place to advertise.
Simpli - Your source for San Jose dedicated servers and colocation!
Debian stable is old but it's STABLE. I stick with testing and go hunting for updated packages if I need them, but rarely do I need to do something "cutting-edge". I've had unstable create SERIOUS problems, particularly with glibc versions, but that's unstable for you.
As for unusability, I definitely agree that there are more user-friendly OSes out there than Debian. I don't believe Linux is desktop-ready for the masses right now, and I don't believe Debian will ever be. However, I really like it for running servers. And I believe servers should eschew fancy user interfaces and put the power towards the services instead -- why on earth do we need a fancy graphical UI to run a web server?
Debian's free. Debian does what I want it to do. Debian ain't perfect, but it's pretty damn good at some things. And I never have to worry about it going away.
Sorry about that.
i switched back to linux this month after 4 years of windows development and decided to try with Woody based on reviews of no frills, stability & the packaging system. - installation took 1 night - configuring X and installing KDE 1 night - getting sound working 1 night. i love it. configuring X & sound was not intuitive but some heavy IRC sessions on #debian got me through the tough times. I have about 5 years IRIX admin experience from a long time ago and I find the package system very reminscent of the IRIX package system. And now I have a DVD player more stable than my crappy Windows 98 software. Well worth the effort
actully, the article is pretty negative toward the new debian. It actually talks about how other linux versions had better features that he wished were in debian.
Disco Stu was talkin' to you.
is that debian is NOT a desktop distribution. Even if the debian people would like to think that it is. The default configuration of "desktop software" is soo bad its just unusable.. Even Gentoo, which is even more hardcore than debian seems to be have a nicer default desktop setup.. And I never had on Gentoo the kind of problem that I have with debian...
But, I use debian on ALL of my servers. Debian on the server just rocks. Especially being able to upgrade it without ever going to the console.. Why do you have to reboot a RedHat system to upgrade it?? I never understood that.. Upgrading debian is a breeze...
of good configuration and installation takes that all away from Debian.
Is Debian not shipping with vi anymore?
I am no newbie linux user and after using Redhat,Mandrake and SUSE for years tried out the Debian Woody. After going through 10000+ packages deciding what to install. The installer crashed half way through......twice. Not only that every single package on the distro is sooooo outdated. The installer doesn't even support ext3 out of the box and installs a 2.2 kernel by default. Yuck....Sure I know what you uber elite debian diehards are thinking. But I don't really care...you aren't using it cause it installs easy or has all the nice tools, new packages and support and stuff...you just use it because its cool :)
Debian is NOT for first time linux users! Unfortunately, the reviewer(s) definitely sounded like they were anyway. Aside from dselect being a little daunting the first time you use it, the install is very easy. Dselect is very easy to use, after you hit ? and read the help page. Otherwise, don't bother.
I'm not really sure why the people at Linuxwatch need a Debian config generator.. XFree86 4 has included two generators that work fine for me. Oh, and I have a rather odd dual head system. Geforce2 and a Voodoo 3. XFree86 -configure, and xf86cfg. Is it really so hard to type those out?
For anyone with a clue, Debian is great! There are so many things that just *make sense* and are missing from other distros. For instance, the reason KDE's application menu was so hard to use as the review stated is because applications from DEB packages are automagically shared between window managers.
Debian is something that you either love or hate. I love it. Everything from the directory structure to the logs to the default application settings are wonderful. How many distros ship sendmail with smtp auth and TLS enabled? :) If you are an advanced user don't let the review fool you. Give it a chance!
Debian isn't for newbies, it isn't for people who need their hand held, it isn't for your mom. And it will never be. Never. It's not a goal of the project to make Debian easy to use for your grandmother. That's just the way it is.
Now, maybe a la Debian Junior, a Debian-based project will develop whose goals are to make Debian easy to use for your Boss' secretary, but Debian per se is NOT that project.
Debian isn't easy for noobs to use. Debian also doesn't help me decorate my home!! Guess what? Both comparisons are invalid.
Anyone can run/maintain a website. You don't have to be a professional writer to post a review of anything these days. Therefore, it's not essential to have good spelling or grammatical skills. I'm not saying that I could do any better, but then I'm not passing myself off as a professional writer.
I've been using Debian for a while on an old (circa 1998) Digital alpha workstation and it is rock solid and was not *that* hard to install. The magic that 'apt-get dist-upgrade' does more than makes up for the holes in the installation process. My biggest wish is that debian could keep up with redhat as far as versions go... I had to build my own KDE 3.0 and mozilla 1.0 from source.
grrrrr
Having to put the box behind a firewall when it is spose to be the firewall just to update it and snag the kernel source and compile sux!.
But then I look at the package install system, and hope springs anew.
Regardless, my Debian install is a linux-mips, root on nfs, SGI Indy, installed via netboot. Obviously not something the 'average user' is going to be doing. But the fact that I was able to do it with only a few hickups in the install impressed the hell out of me.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
Debian is for people who like to shift the gears themselves (and occasionally pop the clutch). :^)
...at least from my perspective: I came from Slackware. I loved slackware, except that little part about keeping it updated. I still have slackware machines, and it's a headache, having to update 20 or so different libraries and utilities in order to go from Sawfish .38 to Sawfish 1.0.1. Debian doesn't remove the hand-configuration, but gives me an easy way to keep current.
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
Nice articles. I installed Debian back in the day, my third linux flavor following slackware and redhat. I wasn't very impressed with it at the time. I installed it again several months back (and several, several, several levels higher of linux experiece) but still found it lacking. I didn't find the install very hard but did find it frusterating on the lack of configuration tools.
Love aptget though and I'll be trying out the new release on one of my boxes for sure.
And as a side note to those who don't pronounce it correctly (MEKTARUIN) The man who brought us the Debian package is Ian and his girl is Deb, hence DebIan.
*DrugCheese rants*
First, the food is great, smells delicious and looks very good. However that is in the kitchen and you are outside the restaurant. Getting inside will be a long, drawn out process of finding dependency problems within the "walk" module that requires an updated version of leg_ver_2, specifically from leg_i386_2_4.23.02.042-2 to leg_i386_2_4.23.02.042-3 as well as similar requirements for "central_nervious_system", "balance", "coordination" and more. Then opening the door is going to really blow your mind.
If you think any of this is on one site you are dead wrong. Furthermore, this stuff is 2 years old and yet is still flaky. Once inside (after pulling your hair out... 16 packages for that one) you must interface with the host/hostess. Since the interface is in a very specific language you must now install the interpreters and associated libs for that (25 packages... all about 0.00.00.000-00.0001 difference). Skipping another 50 or so packages that oddly enough create a paradoxical interdependency loop that baffles the mind, you must attempt to read the menu, order your food, eat the food and don't forget to pay before leaving. You are looking at hundreds of megs of packages that basically enumerate numbers, while avoiding a logical method of separating implementation from lib change abstraction. Gee, I hear there is a newer lib for blah_lib out today, that is a 00.000.000.00.00000.00.0000001 difference so I will require that now! Yay!
I consider myself to be a seasoned Linux user. I have been using various distributions of Linux exclusively on my desktop for two years now.
My school's Unix Users Group runs a periodic Install Fest, where people bring in their desktops, and UUG members load Linux onto them.
Having settled in Debian myself, I figured I would be able to easily install it for someone else. While all my buddies were zipping through the RedHat 8.0 installation for others, I tenatiously stuck with Debian 3.0 for the guy who came to my station.
Things were complicated by the fact that his network card would not play nice with our switch, so I had to use the CD installation (I always prefer the net install with Debian). It took me about twice as long as the RedHat guys just to get a basic system installed and a command prompt. Then his USB mouse wasn't being recognized by the kernel at all.
Well, the guy went home, and then installed Mandrake over the Debian installation I had worked so hard to start up, because he couldn't figure out how to configure his network or his USB mouse, and he didn't want to go through the time or trouble to get it working. Mandrake just did it for him, and he was on his way with his classwork.
It wasn't until I replaced my own motherboard that I realized that you have to use UHCI for some USB chipsets and OHCI for other USB chipsets (he probably had a chipset that was different than that which came with the Debian kernel image). Mandrake and RedHat just figure all that out for you. I wish Debian would do the same.
Some of the guys on the UUG mailing list are claiming that since RedHat now has apt-get, there is no longer any good reason to keep using Debian. I argue that some of Debian's strongest points are that its developers are not blown about by every whim of the market, and when they say "stable," they mean it. Also, the unstable branch provides ample opportunity to keep up-to-date with the latest and greatest packages, if that's what floats your boat.
Well, to make a long story short, for now, I tend to encourage newbies to just use RedHat or Mandrake ... but to keep their /home directories on a separate partition for the day that they will wipe their root partition and install Debian ;-)
An unjust law is no law at all. - St. Augustine
An Unbiased Review of Debian 3.0
/proc/cpuinfo. Instead I was confronted with a maze of kernels once I got to the software selection stage, installed 2.4.18, and then belatedly realised that only 2.4.16 had the ALSA drivers I wanted. Why not offer two defaults in the final base install screen Kernel-2.2.20-$arch and Kernel-2.4.16-$arch (where $arch is the probed value of the most suitable CPU) with a third option to select the kernel yourself. And for the record, I have no idea what the point of the modules page was - was I meant to manually install each and every module?!
/dev/hdd wasn't set up, not even as a plain CD-ROM. The menus were all over the place. The fonts in GTK apps were hideously big. XftConfig wasn't set up to disable antialiasing for standard size fonts, nor were the workarounds for symbol and console fonts (mentioned here) included. Another bug.
/etc/debmenus, and in the post-install stage run a script which creates from it th
e necessary menu entries in all the window managers and environments.
/usr/kde2 -> /usr/kde-2.2.2 and /usr/gnome1 -> /usr/gnome-1.4.1. The fact is, that given what I've had, and will probably get when RedHat 8.0 inevitably starts going around the magazines, it's hard to be upbeat about the Debian desktop.
This is a critical review of Debian 3.0, but I want to say right from the start that I'm not trying to bait anyone. However I feel that reviewers often root for Debian as the open-source underdog, and give it marks which it doesn't deserve. If RedHat 8.0 came out with installation software like Debian 3.0 it would be savaged. I think it's time for an honest review, to spur the Debian developers into making the best possible distribution. I really want Debian to succeed. I want to use it daily, and recommend it to my friends. But I can't do that right now and I think it's important people understand why.
Installation
My first experience of Linux came with a boxed version of SuSE 6.0, back in the middle of 1999 when Linux was starting to get noticed in a big way. The entire thing was a text-mode affair, powered by the venerable YaST version 1. I spent days just poring through the manual, trying to wrap my head around fdisk, and hoping it would all turn out okay. It did, and I never looked back. Six months later a version of RedHat (five point something or the other I think) was shipped with a magazine I bought, and I gave it a whirl. This too was backed with a text-based installer, but it was a lot easier to use than YaST. I didn't even bother with the documentation, I just slipped it in the CD drive and winged it. Shortly thereafter I tried the first version of Mandrake, which had pretty much the exact same installation process..
The point of all this reminiscing is to show that I'm not a complete neophyte (though I'm nowhere near being a guru for that matter). Since then I've tried the RedHat and Mandrake graphical installs, and while RedHat is the one I like best, Mandrake has been the distribution I've stuck with solely because of drakconf and it's associated tools, which make configuring a Linux system a breeze. However lately I've been aspiring to ascend to guru status, or at the very least PFY, so I gave Debian a whirl. I have to admit I was disappointed both with the installation procedure and the finished system. In all my time with Linux, Debian's is the worst installer I've ever had to use.
Setup
There is a lot wrong with it, but mainly the fact is that it's an awfully stupid piece of software. And I don't mean stupid as in bad, I mean as in not clever. It expects the user to know everything. So, for example, even though XFree86 has fully documented the branded names that each driver supports, Debian simply supplies a list of the driver names themselves. People with, say, a GeForce card packaged by Creative will have a hard time picking the nv driver. However they should be glad that they have a choice at all - a lot of screens only give highly technical examples and refer the users to documentation that hasn't even been installed yet! For example why couldn't a list of keyboards, e.g. Irish Keyboard, US Keyboard, Sun US Keyboard etc. be given instead of expecting the user to type in xfree86, pc105, ie with uk as alternative.
This is simple fundamental stuff, the kind of thing most other distros had sorted out back in '99 when everything was via textmode and the Linux GUI was new and exciting. However, in this day and age, I would expect far more from a distribution. There should be no need for me to enter in the same locale based settings over and over again. Once I'd selected Europe->Western->Dublin as the timezone, the system should have realised that the appropriate locale was en_IE@euro, that the keyboard should be set up with proper Euro support (it doesn't seem to be, AltGr is mapped as Alt so I can't easily print bars, the Euro symbol, or accents for stuff I write in Irish), that the Euro packages should be installed by default (they weren't) and a whole raft of other tiny stuff like KDE and Gnome localisation. Certainly people should be presented with the chance to confirm these options, but it should be a simple matter of hitting Enter most of the way. If they want to change the default, they should first be presented with a list of preconfigured settings for, e.g. keyboards, out of which they can then opt into the sort of technical xfree86, pc105, etc. settings.
This willfull stupidity of the installer extends to other aspects of the setup also - with so many kernels available, Debian should pick the most appropriate one to use for my system. It's not that hard to open up
Package Selection
This brings me nicely along to package selection. Tasksel wasn't too bad, though I'd expect more options. For example, instead of X11 have X11, Typical Desktop (Gnome & KDE) and Esoteric Desktop (WindowMaker and Enlightenment) and so on. I was mystified to see I could select Fortran and Tcl/Tk support, but not Perl, PHP, or Java - some of the most popular languages today. However nothing, not in all my 22 years on this Earth, could prepare me for the horrors of dselect. Sweet merciful divine!
Firstly the developers should check out Eugenia's comments on osnews.com about the new Yast2 package manager, as many of the same things apply. In the end it all boils down to the old KISS clich, keep it simple! Instead of giving a load of choices for dependency resolution with half a million optional packages thrown in, just give n + 1 choices, one for each of the n package/package-combinations that fixes the dependency, and one to install without resolving it. Similarly with conflict resolution it should be remove selected, remove conflicting or ignore.
Worse yet are the help screens that pop up at every opportunity, yet which don't actually explain everything (like the meaning of those EIOM headers at the top of the screen). At the end of the day, it should be fairly obvious what's going on. Leave complex package selection tools for the post install, at this stage people just want to get the damn thing working. It drove me nuts having to pass through that stupid help screen every time a dependency arose.
What's worst of all is that if, for example, dselect fails to download a package from the Internet, it prompts the user with a basic text mode question asking them if they want to cancel. I assumed this meant just cancel that particular package. It didn't, and I found myself dumped into the console on a base system. I knew enough to extricate myself, but this is hardly something the average newbie is going to be able to cope with.
The Installation Overall
I want to make sure people realise I'm not trying to advocate a graphical installer. It would be a good move ahead, and should be available for Debian 4.0, but all the stuff I've mentioned here could be easily implemented in a text-mode installer written using ncurses. In fact, I would recommend a Model-View-Controller approach, with the Model, the bit that does all the actual work, being packed into a library, and two Views being created with, say, ncurses and Qt, each of which uses the Model library to do what's needed.
Debian's installer does have some redeeming features. For one thing it is rock solid. With several versions of Mandrake I have had proble ms setting up the mouse and getting the package selector to install all the selected packages. This didn't happen in Debian. Downloading updates from the web during the install is also a great idea (though I was a little aghast to find my 56K modem facing into 100M of updates). The provision of non-free sites is a great help, given the conflict between Debian's all-free stance and the wants of the average user.
The crucial factor is that the installer should be made as intelligent as possible, and to hide the actual de tails behind Advanced buttons. Guess as much as possible from initial locale data. Use branded names instead of driver names for hardware, be it keyboards, mice, graphics cards or soundcards. I hadn't mentioned this but Debian should aim to have sound working as a default in every new installation, prompting users for their soundcard make from a list in a similar in fashion to the XFree one. In this day and age, every OS should have sound support. By all means, let one of the brands on the list be No Soundcard, but offer to install and configure it at any rate.
Dselect needs to be totally re-designed. I can appreciate its power, but it's far to complex and hard to use. Aim to replicate the way things work in graphical GUIs - have drop down lists and checkboxes which can be ticked to install items, even if said boxes are represented by [ ] and [X]. There is a case to be made for complex package installation software, but half way through an OS install isn't really the place.
The Configured System
Having finally got everything installed, I was, I confess, pretty disappointed with the results. Bugs started appearing. Firstly, when selecting the Irish locale in KDE 2.2.2, I found KDE trying to tell me that the Irish currency was the pound, something which hasn't been the case since the Euro was introduced in 2000, two and a half years ago. Then kwrite decided it wouldn't display documents it opened and konqueror decided all pages should be 2000 pixels wide, even though the window was about 800.
Sound didn't work, and consequently the KDE bootup screen stalled for ages at the window manager stage while arts slowly died, then popped up a No Sound message box. None of the PPP connection tools wor ked when not used by root. None of the hard disk partitions were configured (even though they had been recognised by the piece of code that set up LILO). My CDRW at
It was a mess.
Firstly the menus. In Enlightenment and Gnome you have a special Debian menu included with the rest in the app launchers. These menus contain everything. Thus, when you're looking for a program, you just go to the Debian menu and it's all gravy. However the Debian menu wan't included in KDE, instead there were a load of Debian submenus, which didn't seem to include everything. What made this especially heinous was that if a Debian menu had been included in KDE, I could have made a launcher out of it. At this stage, though, I don't believe that's enough. Debian should follow the lead of every other major distro and offer the exact same menu layout throughout. All you need is for graphical packages to install an information file in, e.g.
I've got most of the sound and KDE stuff off my chest, though frankly its deeply disappointing. It's the first time I've experienced functional bugs in any KDE version, and I started with 0.99. The only other time I've seen a major bug was a cosmetic issue with KDE 2.1 (?) in SuSE 7.3 which caused vertical stripes to appear on widget background s.
Again I've dealt with the appalling foul up of Euro-support. The support packages should have been installed by default when I selected en_IE@euro. The AltGr-4 keymap should have been set up. As far as I'm concerned these are functional bugs.
The PPP tools could definitely have been set up better. The default setting is only an invitation to newbies to use root for web-browsing. They could be set up using sudo, or else set up them with rwsr-sr-- permissions and root.pppusers ownership. That way, at the user creation screen you could ask if people should have permission to connect to the net, and make them members of the pppaccess group if permission was granted.
GTK, and consequently Mozilla, looked atrocious due to the oversized fonts (look at Windows, MacOS, BeOS, other Linux distros - they all have fonts a round 11px), and changing the default font in GTK is a bit of a struggle for newbies (how obvious is Theme Selector after all). I changed it to Helvetica at 12, and now things look okay.
The fact is, I'm going to have to invest a considerable amount of time just to get things to the same level that Mandrake and RedHat give straight out of the default install. This is not something that will attract new people. Oth erwise the system seems reasonable. I'll have to wait a while before I can make any pronouncements with regard to stability. Anecdotal evidence is extremely positive, but my initial experience hasn't matched. I was a little disappointed with the way files were arranged. I had hoped Debian would lead the world away from RedHat's madness and stick KDE and Gnome in their own subdirectories, e.g.
Conclusions
I'm sure you're aware that this isn't going to be glowing. Debian's installer is several years out of date, and needs a serious overhaul. It's not fit for commercial consumption, and is only good enough for established Debian users and poor wannabe PFYs like myself. This is not a sustainable situation. Apt-get is good, but RPM has caught up with it for the most part thanks to apt-rpm and urpmi. I'll take everyone's word for it and say that Debian is, for the most part, stable. I like the fact that the packagers are willing to hold back and patch existing stable software to get a decent system, and not one that seems to be in permanent beta. This is why I went for it in the first place.
But people who chose Debian aren't rewarded. Installation and post-install configuration is a bit of a nightmare. Debian should organise people to collect code from the Webmin, Linuxconf and Mandrake configuration programs and create Debian's own configuration framework. At this stage of Linux development it's compulsory, even RedHat has finally copped on to this. Indeed, I would recommend following RedHat in several arenas. I believe Bluecurve is free, Debian should package it - it gives everything a nice polished look. People can then change things if they want to. Having worked in MIS a bit, I know that people will always find a way to muck about with display settings, even if word-processors give them palpitations.
I think peopl e should get together and form a DebianDesktop group, committed to creating a package which will install several different themes, configurations and menus. People can be asked near the end of the install if they would like their desktop customised - if they answer yes, this package could be installed. Similarly work should be done on intelligent installers and hardware auto-detection (though the latter is obviously going to be especially difficult for a multi-platform system). The priority should be the simple installer though, hardware detection can wait.
The inspiration for this article was an article I saw on this site a while back bemoaning Debian's loss of mindshare, attributing it in part due to the lack of attention in the media. Most of the pertinent points were made in the article and accompanying comments. An open-source distribution needs mindshare to survive, but the media won't cover distros which don't have the latest whiz-bang desktop software. If Debian formally released a distribution based on the Test tree compiled with GCC 3.2 for 686mmx, its marketshare would explode. Just look at Gentoo, a hideous installation process, but a system equivalent to a Honda Civic with added spoiler, exhausts, alloy wheels and, of course, go-fast stripes. In other words, something for the lads to show off.
Such a system would have the benefit of bringing a lot more bug-reports into the system, g iving a better stable distro. Mandrake are sucking a lot of the talent Debian needs through cooker. They've openly thought about making the distribution packaging process totally open and building a value-added distro around it like Progeny. If this were to happen it would place Debian into a very tough place.
The new Debian needs to blow people away. It needs to be Granny-proof. It needs an installer that people can bluff their way through, with an attractive, well configured desktop on the other side. Debian maintainers should check out the competition now and again, to see where they can improve. Because if they don't, Debian will lose developers, and become less and less of a force in the Linux world
-Shippy
I haven't used Debian in 4 years and that's still funny. I just hope I don't have any nightmares tonight from the old memories. Can it still really be as bad as it was in Hamm?
Let's not waste time on pretty pictures in the installer; rather, the installer needs to get more robust and support more hardware and installation methods. Installs from USB should be easy (carry Debian on a USB drive key). Installs from RAM disk should be possible (load the entire first stage into RAM using the BIOS, then install from there), and perhaps even the default. Those are the kinds of things that make installs easy, not pretty pictures of penguins.
From then on, they just apt-get new versions.
I do security
I just don't think this guy is part of what you would call Debian's "target audience". Part of the reason I like Debian is that it doesn't make me go sorting through a huge list of video cards. I know that I need the nv driver and that I'll probably be quickly switching it to the nvidia driver once the system is up and running.
In fact, I have pre-written and tweaked XFree86 configuration files for each of my different machines available on one box via scp. There's no need to even ask me X questions in a system installer.
You may not have the option to install PHP from the setup menu, but I don't really care. I already know the name of the package to apt-get (not like the name isn't obvious) and I'd rather just type apt-get install php than go digging through potentially thousands of packages in a GUI list to find it. Hell, even if I didn't know it, I could fairly easily just apt-cache search php and find out.
On a different note, Java probably isn't readily available due to legal issues with Sun. FreeBSD is the same way, you have to manually fetch the necessary distribution file from java.sun.com. It's not like this is hard to do.
I'm not trying to troll or be a jerk. I like Debian because, as an experienced user, it gets out of my way most of the time and what it *does* do for me is truly useful. Its package system makes it extremely quick and easy for me to keep my systems up to date without burying me in a mountain of GUI widgets.
I respect the reviewers opinion, and don't necessarily have a problem with the review. I would, however, ask that he understand that there are tons of distributions out there right now. Some are geared towards people who don't want to get some dirt under their fingernails, and a precious few are geared towards those who either do or who have and are fully comfortable with it. Some of the former even have Debian underpinnings with a face he would be more happy with. Maybe there's not a problem with Debian, maybe it's just not for him.
Game... blouses.
Often when you do all things by hand you end up with a much better system than if everything is done automagically. Because only you know what you want its hard for someone else to do it for you. Usually you only configure an application once and since i dont install/uninstall apps all day (isnt fun anymore, i use my apps instead) the time spent tweaking files is very small once you get the system flying.
I think there exists space for all variations of linux dists and together they provide an excellent path for some people like me to walk on. Start off with a nice easy dist and as you grow you go towards Debian/Slack/Gentoo etc. One of the many reasons that i left windows was that i felt stuck, squeezed between MS and its developers. The same apply for very userfriendly dists too. I like the control and system-knowledge it gives me when i build my own system from scratch.
I really dont think we should push all dists towards user friendly. There are disadvantages with that too as it tends to empower n00bs at the expence of experienced users. More flawors is better as long as they all follow the Linux Standard Base.
HTTP/1.1 400
Like with languages, it does little good to speak if those around you cannot understand. In order to properly configure the system it would be helpful to include a CONSISTENT instruction set. Knowing what is preferred (i.e. will result in less bugs and instabilities, heartaches and days worth of tweaking) for the Debian packages helps alot. Some say use the apt config, others say use this, or that or that other one there. So... what is it?
what they want!
;-).
I have to maintain a dozen RH boxes and a half dozen mandrake boxes, it sucks compared to keeping a Debian system up.
Further trying to build a dedicated server from RH of Mandrake is terrible. For security reasons a minimal install is best, but its just plain hard to get with "we know what you want" distros.
debian is also getting a complete overhaul in the installer dept. remade from scratch with a modular interface (you want gui? ok, you want dialog, ok you want webmin that will be there also) that will be able to interface with any installer layout you choose (if the interface module exists, or yo uwrite one
-- The morphemes of your disquisition are ascertainable, but they have eschewed an ambit of transpicuous exposition.
Well, I looked at the reviews and honestly didn't see anything wrong. Yes, it uses a nice, compact, no hand-holding installer. An installation system that does not do anything more than it needs. No autodetection routines that stuff binary drivers into the kernel. No control panels and flashy utilis that do things for you. Yeah, debian is great, what's your point?
The point of having a server OS is to get it to do useful work without having it hinder / annoy / frustrate you. The ease of install is important in getting the OS installed. Debian certainly lacks in that area. But only a novice would consider the ease of installation a detraction so severe that it overshadows the other good or excellent properties of the server. And trust me : you do not want a novice to administer a production server.
I confess that I am a Debian fan. Despite that, I am able to percieve Debian's deficiencies. The install certainly sucks. I had the pleasure of recently installing Redhat v7.3 . After dealing with Debian's install, the Redhat installer simply took my breath away. It was that smooth. However, the time came to put the OS to use. I needed a way to convert postscript files to pdf. For that, I installed ghostscript on Redhat. It did the conversion alright, but the generated document was useless to me because the fonts werent installed on the system. I repeated the same process on Debian : the dependancies took care to install all required fonts. Voila - the document displayed correctly!
Now would you prefer an OS that works easier over an OS that installs better?
There is no such thing as luck. Luck is nothing but an absence of bad luck.
Back in 1999, when I first switched to Linux, (slashdot being one of the places that had informed me about it), the first boxed distro I picked up at the local stores was Debian GNU/Linux, with the free
"Learning Debian GNU/Linux" book from O'Reilly. I did things the old fashioned way: I did websearches for my hardware to make sure they were supported, and dove right into the install.
It took me around 10 mins to setup X. Sound was a bit more problematic, but #debian proved helpful.
Unfortunately, that box died, and I had to get a replacement earlier this year, but my point is : the installer isn't really hard, but Debian expects more from the user in terms of knowledge. And honestly, reliable hardware autodetection should be one of them by now.
Be kind. There are too many mean people out there already.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
i built a k6-2 450 out of spare parts a few days ago (192 mb ram/ 4gb scsi 2 harddrive pirated from an old mac/ 32mb tnt 2 ultra)
i wasted a stack of cd's downloading and attempting to install redhat 8 which froze at precisely 13% during the install regardless of what I did (i tried *everything* to make it work, different filesystems/different partitioning schemes/different bootloaders).
i then gave up and made 2 diskettes for a debian install and a couple hours later had a perfectly good working debian install w/ the net install option (a fan of which I had been previously from my extremely positive experiences with OpenBSD), yea the mouse which is a usb trackball -> ps/2 adapter -> 9 pin serial adapter doesn't work and neither does X but at least I have a workable system where RedHat failed miserably for all it's pretty GUI-installer fame
having said that, and being a 7 year *nix veteran, i can say that dselect STILL sucks (as it did when i first tried debian 2.2 on my laptop years ago) but at least most of the library dependency problems seemt o hav ebeen fixed and apt-get is badass (read fuckabunchofrpms)
$.02
This is a critical review of Debian 3.0, but I want to say right from the start that I'm not trying to bait anyone. However I feel that reviewers often root for Debian as the open-source underdog, and give it marks which it doesn't deserve. If RedHat 8.0 came out with installation software like Debian 3.0 it would be savaged. I think it's time for an honest review, to spur the Debian developers into making the best possible distribution. I really want Debian to succeed. I want to use it daily, and recommend it to my friends. But I can't do that right now and I think it's important people understand why.
/proc/cpuinfo. Instead I was confronted with a maze of kernels once I got to the software selection stage, installed 2.4.18, and then belatedly realised that only 2.4.16 had the ALSA drivers I wanted. Why not offer two defaults in the final base install screen Kernel-2.2.20-$arch and Kernel-2.4.16-$arch (where $arch is the probed value of the most suitable CPU) with a third option to select the kernel yourself. And for the record, I have no idea what the point of the modules page was - was I meant to manually install each and every module?!
/dev/hdd wasn't set up, not even as a plain CD-ROM. The menus were all over the place. The fonts in GTK apps were hideously big. XftConfig wasn't set up to disable antialiasing for standard size fonts, nor were the workarounds for symbol and console fonts (mentioned here) included. Another bug.
/etc/debmenus, and in the post-install stage run a script which creates from it the necessary menu entries in all the window managers and environments.
/usr/kde2 -> /usr/kde-2.2.2 and /usr/gnome1 -> /usr/gnome-1.4.1. The fact is, that given what I've had, and will probably get when RedHat 8.0 inevitably starts going around the magazines, it's hard to be upbeat about the Debian desktop.
Installation
My first experience of Linux came with a boxed version of SuSE 6.0, back in the middle of 1999 when Linux was starting to get noticed in a big way. The entire thing was a text-mode affair, powered by the venerable YaST version 1. I spent days just poring through the manual, trying to wrap my head around fdisk, and hoping it would all turn out okay. It did, and I never looked back. Six months later a version of RedHat (five point something or the other I think) was shipped with a magazine I bought, and I gave it a whirl. This too was backed with a text-based installer, but it was a lot easier to use than YaST. I didn't even bother with the documentation, I just slipped it in the CD drive and winged it. Shortly thereafter I tried the first version of Mandrake, which had pretty much the exact same installation process..
The point of all this reminiscing is to show that I'm not a complete neophyte (though I'm nowhere near being a guru for that matter). Since then I've tried the RedHat and Mandrake graphical installs, and while RedHat is the one I like best, Mandrake has been the distribution I've stuck with solely because of drakconf and it's associated tools, which make configuring a Linux system a breeze. However lately I've been aspiring to ascend to guru status, or at the very least PFY, so I gave Debian a whirl. I have to admit I was disappointed both with the installation procedure and the finished system. In all my time with Linux, Debian's is the worst installer I've ever had to use.
Setup
There is a lot wrong with it, but mainly the fact is that it's an awfully stupid piece of software. And I don't mean stupid as in bad, I mean as in not clever. It expects the user to know everything. So, for example, even though XFree86 has fully documented the branded names that each driver supports, Debian simply supplies a list of the driver names themselves. People with, say, a GeForce card packaged by Creative will have a hard time picking the "nv" driver. However they should be glad that they have a choice at all - a lot of screens only give highly technical examples and refer the users to documentation that hasn't even been installed yet! For example why couldn't a list of keyboards, e.g. "Irish Keyboard", "US Keyboard", "Sun US Keyboard" etc. be given instead of expecting the user to type in "xfree86", "pc105", "ie" with "uk" as alternative.
This is simple fundamental stuff, the kind of thing most other distros had sorted out back in '99 when everything was via textmode and the Linux GUI was new and exciting. However, in this day and age, I would expect far more from a distribution. There should be no need for me to enter in the same locale based settings over and over again. Once I'd selected Europe->Western->Dublin as the timezone, the system should have realised that the appropriate locale was en_IE@euro, that the keyboard should be set up with proper Euro support (it doesn't seem to be, AltGr is mapped as Alt so I can't easily print bars, the Euro symbol, or accents for stuff I write in Irish), that the Euro packages should be installed by default (they weren't) and a whole raft of other tiny stuff like KDE and Gnome localisation. Certainly people should be presented with the chance to confirm these options, but it should be a simple matter of hitting Enter most of the way. If they want to change the default, they should first be presented with a list of preconfigured settings for, e.g. keyboards, out of which they can then opt into the sort of technical "xfree86", "pc105", etc. settings.
This willfull stupidity of the installer extends to other aspects of the setup also - with so many kernels available, Debian should pick the most appropriate one to use for my system. It's not that hard to open up
Package Selection
This brings me nicely along to package selection. Tasksel wasn't too bad, though I'd expect more options. For example, instead of X11 have "X11", "Typical Desktop (Gnome & KDE)" and "Esoteric Desktop (WindowMaker and Enlightenment)" and so on. I was mystified to see I could select Fortran and Tcl/Tk support, but not Perl, PHP, or Java - some of the most popular languages today. However nothing, not in all my 22 years on this Earth, could prepare me for the horrors of dselect. Sweet merciful divine!
Firstly the developers should check out Eugenia's comments on osnews.com about the new Yast2 package manager, as many of the same things apply. In the end it all boils down to the old KISS clich, keep it simple! Instead of giving a load of choices for dependency resolution with half a million optional packages thrown in, just give n + 1 choices, one for each of the n package/package-combinations that fixes the dependency, and one to install without resolving it. Similarly with conflict resolution it should be remove selected, remove conflicting or ignore.
Worse yet are the help screens that pop up at every opportunity, yet which don't actually explain everything (like the meaning of those EIOM headers at the top of the screen). At the end of the day, it should be fairly obvious what's going on. Leave complex package selection tools for the post install, at this stage people just want to get the damn thing working. It drove me nuts having to pass through that stupid help screen every time a dependency arose.
What's worst of all is that if, for example, dselect fails to download a package from the Internet, it prompts the user with a basic text mode question asking them if they want to cancel. I assumed this meant just cancel that particular package. It didn't, and I found myself dumped into the console on a base system. I knew enough to extricate myself, but this is hardly something the average newbie is going to be able to cope with.
The Installation Overall
I want to make sure people realise I'm not trying to advocate a graphical installer. It would be a good move ahead, and should be available for Debian 4.0, but all the stuff I've mentioned here could be easily implemented in a text-mode installer written using ncurses. In fact, I would recommend a Model-View-Controller approach, with the Model, the bit that does all the actual work, being packed into a library, and two Views being created with, say, ncurses and Qt, each of which uses the Model library to do what's needed.
Debian's installer does have some redeeming features. For one thing it is rock solid. With several versions of Mandrake I have had problems setting up the mouse and getting the package selector to install all the selected packages. This didn't happen in Debian. Downloading updates from the web during the install is also a great idea (though I was a little aghast to find my 56K modem facing into 100M of updates). The provision of non-free sites is a great help, given the conflict between Debian's all-free stance and the wants of the average user.
The crucial factor is that the installer should be made as intelligent as possible, and to hide the actual details behind "Advanced" buttons. Guess as much as possible from initial locale data. Use branded names instead of driver names for hardware, be it keyboards, mice, graphics cards or soundcards. I hadn't mentioned this but Debian should aim to have sound working as a default in every new installation, prompting users for their soundcard make from a list in a similar in fashion to the XFree one. In this day and age, every OS should have sound support. By all means, let one of the brands on the list be "No Soundcard", but offer to install and configure it at any rate.
Dselect needs to be totally re-designed. I can appreciate its power, but it's far to complex and hard to use. Aim to replicate the way things work in graphical GUIs - have drop down lists and checkboxes which can be ticked to install items, even if said boxes are represented by [ ] and [X]. There is a case to be made for complex package installation software, but half way through an OS install isn't really the place.
The Configured System
Having finally got everything installed, I was, I confess, pretty disappointed with the results. Bugs started appearing. Firstly, when selecting the Irish locale in KDE 2.2.2, I found KDE trying to tell me that the Irish currency was the pound, something which hasn't been the case since the Euro was introduced in 2000, two and a half years ago. Then kwrite decided it wouldn't display documents it opened and konqueror decided all pages should be 2000 pixels wide, even though the window was about 800.
Sound didn't work, and consequently the KDE bootup screen stalled for ages at the window manager stage while arts slowly died, then popped up a No Sound message box. None of the PPP connection tools worked when not used by root. None of the hard disk partitions were configured (even though they had been recognised by the piece of code that set up LILO). My CDRW at
It was a mess.
Firstly the menus. In Enlightenment and Gnome you have a special Debian menu included with the rest in the app launchers. These menus contain everything. Thus, when you're looking for a program, you just go to the Debian menu and it's all gravy. However the Debian menu wan't included in KDE, instead there were a load of Debian submenus, which didn't seem to include everything. What made this especially heinous was that if a Debian menu had been included in KDE, I could have made a launcher out of it. At this stage, though, I don't believe that's enough. Debian should follow the lead of every other major distro and offer the exact same menu layout throughout. All you need is for graphical packages to install an information file in, e.g.
I've got most of the sound and KDE stuff off my chest, though frankly its deeply disappointing. It's the first time I've experienced functional bugs in any KDE version, and I started with 0.99. The only other time I've seen a major bug was a cosmetic issue with KDE 2.1 (?) in SuSE 7.3 which caused vertical stripes to appear on widget backgrounds.
Again I've dealt with the appalling foul up of Euro-support. The support packages should have been installed by default when I selected en_IE@euro. The AltGr-4 keymap should have been set up. As far as I'm concerned these are functional bugs.
The PPP tools could definitely have been set up better. The default setting is only an invitation to newbies to use root for web-browsing. They could be set up using sudo, or else set up them with rwsr-sr-- permissions and root.pppusers ownership. That way, at the user creation screen you could ask if people should have permission to connect to the net, and make them members of the pppaccess group if permission was granted.
GTK, and consequently Mozilla, looked atrocious due to the oversized fonts (look at Windows, MacOS, BeOS, other Linux distros - they all have fonts around 11px), and changing the default font in GTK is a bit of a struggle for newbies (how obvious is Theme Selector after all). I changed it to Helvetica at 12, and now things look okay.
The fact is, I'm going to have to invest a considerable amount of time just to get things to the same level that Mandrake and RedHat give straight out of the default install. This is not something that will attract new people. Otherwise the system seems reasonable. I'll have to wait a while before I can make any pronouncements with regard to stability. Anecdotal evidence is extremely positive, but my initial experience hasn't matched. I was a little disappointed with the way files were arranged. I had hoped Debian would lead the world away from RedHat's madness and stick KDE and Gnome in their own subdirectories, e.g.
Conclusions
I'm sure you're aware that this isn't going to be glowing. Debian's installer is several years out of date, and needs a serious overhaul. It's not fit for commercial consumption, and is only good enough for established Debian users and poor wannabe PFYs like myself. This is not a sustainable situation. Apt-get is good, but RPM has caught up with it for the most part thanks to apt-rpm and urpmi. I'll take everyone's word for it and say that Debian is, for the most part, stable. I like the fact that the packagers are willing to hold back and patch existing stable software to get a decent system, and not one that seems to be in permanent beta. This is why I went for it in the first place.
But people who chose Debian aren't rewarded. Installation and post-install configuration is a bit of a nightmare. Debian should organise people to collect code from the Webmin, Linuxconf and Mandrake configuration programs and create Debian's own configuration framework. At this stage of Linux development it's compulsory, even RedHat has finally copped on to this. Indeed, I would recommend following RedHat in several arenas. I believe Bluecurve is free, Debian should package it - it gives everything a nice polished look. People can then change things if they want to. Having worked in MIS a bit, I know that people will always find a way to muck about with display settings, even if word-processors give them palpitations.
I think people should get together and form a DebianDesktop group, committed to creating a package which will install several different themes, configurations and menus. People can be asked near the end of the install if they would like their desktop customised - if they answer yes, this package could be installed. Similarly work should be done on intelligent installers and hardware auto-detection (though the latter is obviously going to be especially difficult for a multi-platform system). The priority should be the simple installer though, hardware detection can wait.
The inspiration for this article was an article I saw on this site a while back bemoaning Debian's loss of mindshare, attributing it in part due to the lack of attention in the media. Most of the pertinent points were made in the article and accompanying comments. An open-source distribution needs mindshare to survive, but the media won't cover distros which don't have the latest whiz-bang desktop software. If Debian formally released a distribution based on the Test tree compiled with GCC 3.2 for 686mmx, its marketshare would explode. Just look at Gentoo, a hideous installation process, but a system equivalent to a Honda Civic with added spoiler, exhausts, alloy wheels and, of course, go-fast stripes. In other words, something for the lads to show off.
Such a system would have the benefit of bringing a lot more bug-reports into the system, giving a better stable distro. Mandrake are sucking a lot of the talent Debian needs through cooker. They've openly thought about making the distribution packaging process totally open and building a value-added distro around it like Progeny. If this were to happen it would place Debian into a very tough place.
The new Debian needs to blow people away. It needs to be Granny-proof. It needs an installer that people can bluff their way through, with an attractive, well configured desktop on the other side. Debian maintainers should check out the competition now and again, to see where they can improve. Because if they don't, Debian will lose developers, and become less and less of a force in the Linux world.
-- The morphemes of your disquisition are ascertainable, but they have eschewed an ambit of transpicuous exposition.
I've stuck with solely because of drakconf and it's associated tools, which make configuring a Linux system a breeze. However lately I've been aspiring to ascend to guru status, or at the very least PFY, so I gave Debian a whirl.
Here's a three step plan to help you become a guru. First, go to the mountian and climb it. Simply climbing it will help, but from the view on the mountian will make you wise. Second, spend time on the mountian. This will give you time to reflect on it and feel its moods, even modify it to suit your own tastes. Third, master the mountian. Once you have learned all it's quirks, you are encouraged to modify the mountian for the benifit of others. In time, you will learn that the simple text based install saves you much grief and hearache, though I would not compare it to the Red Hat install because I don't work on Red Hat much. Everything can be better.
Review #2, allas the same thing:
There are no automatic detection routines for your hardware, no automatic disk partitioning. It took us several attempts to get everything installed and working correctly.
There is X autodetect which has worked for me in the past. As for auto partition, no thanks. I like to set myself up myself, thank you, and the guidlines are where I learned that.
Strangely, this review was more unbiased than the first which proported to be so. It correctly noted that Debian's distribution system rocks. Dselect is a great tool that works for more than simple installs. Reading the insturctions that you MUST click out, you learn that simple vi style searches work! Awsome, type a partial name and your package is found. A graphical front end to this might be nice, but nothing is cooler than being able to secure shell into a box and configure it completely with a few keystrokes, without the overhead of pictures of boxes.
The short of it for me is that Debian easier to keep going once you have it up.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Jesus christ, when will people get over the installer???
The average windows user should never see the installer, ditto the average linux user.
Debian users don't pay attention to the installer because we see it just the once.
Linux distro revieers on the other hand never do any real work with a system, just install, install, install.
Debian runs hard and strong and updates itself.
Because it doesn't rely on tech support for funding it's set up to minmise questions by newbies, by actually installing software so it'll run.
I can't program worth a damm, but once i figured out how to edit a config file, that was as far as i had to develop my skill to get debian boxes hard at work on a number of jobs.
Other distro's look flasher installing (try doing a net install off a pair of floppies tho) but after that you're pretty much on your own.
A serious review would be comparing using the machines for a year, but thats beyond IT journalism in general, and linux journalism in particular.
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
haha...ok, forgive my little play on words.
;-). If you're a new user and want the benefits of Debian (i.e., true to the Free Software spirit, stable as a rock, more secure, great package management system, and lots of packages), then get Libranet or Lindows. Personally, I'd recomment Lindows, as it seems to have more momentum and is even being included on dirt-cheap PC's sold at Walmart. Btw, for those misinformed /.ers, Lindows does not violate the GPL. I assume that their CD also comes with an offer to ship you the source at the cost of shipment.
Debian is not for newbies. It is *possible* for a newbie to install Debian, but only if they know their exact hardware specifications and have studied the Debian installation guides thoroughly. I installed Debian as my first Linux distro, and I'll agree with this author -- its a bitch to install. I knew my exact hardware specs and thoroughly pre-read through the install documentation (this was a graphical install guide) before starting. It was still a bitch. Then there's the setting it up so it meets your needs: another big bitch.
Hence, Debian is not for newbies. Its even confusing for experts. Now that I've used Debian for several years, I know it. But its install process is still unworthy. Do the developers try to make the install as confusing and non-sensical as possible? Is their model for installation, "Debian installer, dumb and daft by default"? A graphical install isn't necessary; in fact, graphical install's don't make it that much easier to install, and are probably a waste of valuable development time. Most users are still smart enough to figure out how to navigate through a text-based install using hte arrow keys if you tell them how to do it with on-screen help (i.e., up to move to previous item, etc).
Conclusion: Debian is not for dummies
Conclusion: Debian for the daring, Lindows & Libranet for learners. You can get Lindows by paying an $99 dollar membership fee, after which you can have Lindows shipped to your house or download it. Don't bitch about the price. And no, they're not offering it for free download off the internet (and NO, that doesn't violate the GPL). These people actually have a business plan which will keep them in business. Personally, I think that $99 is great, since it gives you access future versions of Lindows. After two years, you're click-'n-run deal runs out, and you can purchase click-'n-run service if you still want it.
The thing I like about Lindows is they have a REAL business plan. They seem to be pursuing Lindows as an OS to be installed on computers off the shelf (refer to Walmart), and seem to be pushing for OEMs to have it on their machines off-the-shelf. They also have ways to make money through their valuable click-'n-run service. Best of all, they aren't offering their entire modified version of Debian GNU/Linux online for free download. This mean's that they're not going to become another dot-bomb. Freeloaders, don't whine; if you want something for free (as in $0), get Debian GNU/Linux.
Suggestion to Debian developers: don't waste time with a graphical install, but do make the install more intelligent and logical, with auto-detection; have good default setup. Things should be set up to a good default when you boot into Debian; i.e., 12pt fonts, the WM of your choice set up to a reasonable and useable default (I'd recommend them working on a good default for KDE, GNOME, and WindowMaker).
But don't fret too much over newbie-nicities. Commercial wrap-arounds for Debian like Lindows and Libranet will make a Debian which has great defaults and is easy for the newbies. They will spend their coding time on making reasonable defaults and an easy install. Debian Developers should spend most of their coding time on hard technical details.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
I recently switched to Debian 3.0 after having used Mandrake from version 7.2 to 9.0.
While the Debian installation isn't as polished as Mandrake's I did not find it to be, as the Debian Planet review states,"an awfully stupid piece of software". The installation seemed to me to be pretty straightforward and I'm no guru. I did make sure that I knew what each piece of hardware in my computer was before I tried the install. That made module selection fairly simple. I'll admit that I was intimidated a bit by dselect and I only used it for a few packages.
Overall I'm very impressed with Debian 3.0. I tried 2.2 a while back but it seemed so outdated that I stayed with Mandrake. After using 3.0 for a few days now, I think I'm going to make this change permanent.
I see cause and effect at work here. Let's add a third data point: consider Windows, with its wizards, its helpful way of deciding for you what needs to be done... and of course its simply wonderful stability, as well as the whole issue of talking a WinWizard out of doing things its way when that's not how you want it done.
That, dear slashies, isn't a coincidence. It's a trend line.
Its always a good idea to have /home on a different partition than your OS essentials. For one thing, when you do a backup, you have a lot of options when it comes to backing up a distinct partition. You can do separate backups for your system directories and user data (home directories). That way, if your OS ever goes South you can reinstall just the OS without sweating over what happens to user data. Conversely, if your user data needs to be recovered, its easier to restore without sweating over whether you'll kill the entire system.
There is no such thing as luck. Luck is nothing but an absence of bad luck.
HA! Debian is The One True Operating System!
apt-get reality!
-D
First, there is more to a distribution than the install procedure. Both of these reviews review "Installation and first 10 minutes" which, while being a small part of the user experiance of a Linux distribution, isn't anywhere near the whole story.
In trying to review Debian the same way they review other distributions (which perhaps *only* improve their install system between releases, so as to get better reviews), both of these critics have done Debian a great disservice.
I've been running Linux for about 4 years now, and I've used the install systems for most of the major Linux distributions (Red Hat, Mandrake, Slackware, SuSE, etc). Over this past weekend, I installed Debian on 5 computers. I can absolutly assure you that I would be completely stalled at 3/5 with any other distribution's install system. It's awfully hard to install from CDROM when a machine has no CD drive.
Now, for a newbie I can see that some of the options in the install might be intimidating, but it's all pretty easy if you actually printed out the install document like the website told you to...
Any reviewer of debian that doesn't even manage to notice the fact that Debian can automatically fetch from the internet and install over 8710 different software packages and have virtually any valid combination of them work together perfectly is perhaps not actually interested in reviewing Debian.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Now hold on a second there. Whenever someone mentions RPM, somebody throws up an apt-get comment. Whenever KDE is mentioned, Gnome is also in the discussion. Emacs and Vi, linux and gnu/hurd, Intel and AMD.
You cannot have a discussion about a thing without mentioning the competitors/alternatives. Apt brings a lot to the table, so does emerge and rpm. A discussion about Debian IS a discussion about apt. And belive you, me, we Mandrake folk had to put up with a lot of apt-get comments over the years, so you Debian types can bite the bullet and listen to what the Gentoo evangelists have to say.
Now, in all seriousness, in a Debian discussion, any comment that is not about Debian should be modded down as off-topic. Likewise, all comments should be about the core story. But the truth of the matter is this: The moderators have spoken. They (me included) want different points of view in every story. Listening to and being around people who disagree is what makes sites like this popular.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
Check out Gentoo Linux [gentoo.org].
I tried it, went back to Debian
The only downside is it will take a while to build X, or any other large package(Gnome, KDE, etc).
You can say that again. On average, a package takes about twice as long to download in source form than in binary form. Also, source takes about as much time again to build. So all up, you're looking at about 4 times as long to install a given Gentoo package as the same package on Debian.
While Gentoo takes you close to the bleeding edge, and while its build system is well put together, it is a far more complicated process to set up a system to your tastes than it is with Debian. You need to know a lot of esoteric internals with some key packages, and are left in a position of often having to beg for help on the #gentoo irc channel.
After going back to Debian sid, I was surprised to find that Debian goes from power-up to usable desktop in 2/3 of the time Gentoo takes (which is 1/2 the time Mandrake takes).
In conclusion, there is no bliss which compares to an installed and working Debian desktop. The installer might not be pretty, but once you're up, you can trust apt-get to add anything you want, to a state which actually works.
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
up2date! up2date! up2date!
It installs dependencies automatically.
If you used up2date and it didn't install the proper dependencies, go to bugzilla.redhat.com and report it as a bug. Otherwise, it's your own damn fault for not reading the docs on Red Hat's site that tell you how to keep your server up to date.
I know, I know, Red Hat's dual boot rocks. Chances are, she won't be looking for a new OS until WinME dies. At that point, I'll be able to chose between installing Debian or installing Red Hat AND Windoze. She really does not need the windoze, and I've got better things to do.
To summarize, while the second review is right to not recomend Debian to someone with zero nix experience and zero support, it's wrong to anyone to conclude Debian is not a distro for everyone. My wife has no problem simply using Debian for all the usual stuff. It's not hard to use, and it's easy to maintain.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
You can tell Red Hat/Mandrake/SuSE suck cuz they're easy to install. That's why I use Debian. It's so l33t it doesn't need a GUI installer! that just proves you have to be l33t to use it! my mom got mad when i installed it on our dell in the family room but it's just cuase she's not l33t! you posers in the data centers running Red Hat on the huge server farms are pussies compared to my l33t mp3 server! uh my mom needs to get a recipe off marthastewart.com, gotta go! keep it l33t! w3rd em up!
To be honest, I would imagine that few if any people use dselect - it's horrible.
I do, and I don't think it is. apt is only useful when you know the exact name of the package you want to install. There are other tools to look through the package list, but I haven't tried them, because dselect works.
Need to know what packages are available? Why? That's what the Web is for. If you know what program you want, you know the name of it, and you can nine times out of ten apt-get install it.
What if you don't know the name of the program you want? What if you don't even know what program you want? What if you don't even know what KIND of program you want?
I've discovered hundreds of programs that I never knew existed, while looking through the dselect list, that wound up enhancing my life greatly. Sure, you can decide what you need/want to do, then find a program that does it, but are you really omniscient when it comes to what software is out there? Literally hundreds of times, I've seen a new package and thought, "Hey, that's killer-radical, I never would have thought that something like this would have existed." If you don't know it exists, how can you search for it?
Running apt-get update and seeing that the package list is larger than it was last time is always like Christmas morning for me: bright, shiny, brand-new packages under the tree, and I don't know what's in them, until I open them and unwrap the surprises inside! They are surprise gifts that I receive at least several of every week! Dselect even puts all your presents (new packages) at the top of the list so you can tear into the new toys waiting for you and decide what you want and what you don't.
Running my weekly apt-get update and then tearing into Dselect like a kid on Christmas is always the highlight of my week, because I usually get at least 2-3 new packages that I actually want to play with. Sometimes the new toys they give me will occupy me all night long. Sometimes a new package that I'd never have found out about with dselect will radically change my life, and always in a good way. Because I see every new package that comes through the system, I always know more about more packages than anyone else I talk to, and I'm always able to tell my friends, "hey, guess what new really cool software is out there now?"
Assume that for every person, there is one package that, if he knew about it, he could use it to radically change his life, find real happiness, acquire great personal fortune, etc. What if he NEVER finds out about it, because he doesn't know what the nature of it is and he doesn't know what to look for? What if he NEVER finds it, because he silently downloads its package listing with an apt-get update but never looks at the description? His life has been impaired, possibly forever, out of ignorance.
I can't take that risk. I'm not willing to accept the risk that a package will appear on my package list that could revolutionize my life, and I never find out about it because I never check the list.
If you never use dselect, you don't know what you're missing. You might be missing nothing of value to you, you might be missing something of minor value to you, or you might be missing out on EVERYTHING.
I do want more control over my system. But how the hell am I supposed to learn Debian if I can't install Debian?
I guess the only viable solution would be to to find a Debian expert and rip off their head and eat out their brain, there-by gaining their knowledge and experience.
...
Oh wait, that was the comic book solution. In the real one I have to substitute "ask them lots of questions" for "rip off...their brain". Much less exciting and much slower. Oh well.
Furry cows moo and decompress.
My first distro was Debian. I love the apt system. I cannot, however, live without software RAID.
/dev/hda1, then move that to /dev/md0. Too much work for too little return. If your distro doesn't support my needs, there are hundreds more that do.
After booting the Woody CD, I tried "modprobe md", only to discover that it isn't supported. I went on the assumption that it was compiled in, but alas, "mkraid" was nowhere to be found. The only real option was to install to a
I'd also like to see a source compile option added. If apt was combined with Gentoo's emerge, Debian would be almost unstopable.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
The biggest problem with reviews of distributions is that they are really reviews of installers. Debian's installer is quite usable, but it is not exactly pretty and streamlined.
But a Debian box only ever needs to be installed once. After that, apt-get update; apt-get upgrade will be all you need to do. Forever. Sure, there will be the occasional hiccup. But they are very very rare. With RedHat or Mandrake or SuSE you get to install de novo yearly. What fun !
So that is the largest point missed - the joy of MAINTAINING a Debian box once installed. The other thing distribution reviews always miss are the startup scripts, including hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly cron jobs. Here, again, Debian shines like a thoroughbred compared to the competition. It almost seems like it is created to make administering boxes easy for someone qualified to be an administrator.
I think that last sentence is probably most descriptive of Debian. It almost seems like it is created to make administering boxes easy for someone qualified to be an administrator. But a review written by someone not so qualified will miss out on many of the finer points that are the distros best attributes.
Actually, RedHat often WILL break if you change configuration files by hand, or, even worse, it will silently change them back without permission.
Debian's a hard-core GNU/Linux distro. Not as hard-core as Slackware or Gentoo, but pretty hard-core, none-the-less. Its developers focus on stability and technical excellence, not hand-holding install and configuration processes.
;-). But when it arrives, it will, like everything else about Debian, be rock solid. Debian could also work on some good defaults. Sound should be there when you first start up WindowMaker. Screen font size should be 12. WindowMaker should be well-configured by default. And so-on, and so-forth. This stuff will happen *eventually*; Debian developer's first priority is stability and technical excellence; superficial issues such as these (which are manageable for Debian's intended expert audience) are on the back-burner.
That said, Debian developers could make things a little bit more intuitive, with the install and autodetection; nothing fancy, but just an intuitive install. Something noteworthy is that graphics card drivers should be by Manufacturer (i.e., Nvidia, ATI), then by Brand Name (i.e., GeForce, GeForce2, TNT, etc); then by the specific driver, with a good stable one selected and recommended by default. Fortunately, eventually Debian will ship with the Progeny Installer (at the rate at which things in Debian move from Unstable -> Testing -> Stable, that'll be sometime around 2010
If you want an easy-to-use, easy-to-configure, easy-to-install, great-defaults Debian *right now*, then pay for Lindows or Libranet (I suggest Lindows). Lindows has glowing reviews for ease of use, and seems to solve all the problems these reviewers harp on.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
haha. ...where you fail to mention that you're not really a programmer. Which is a good thing, because they failed to mention that they're a MSCE Network Engineer over 10,000 users & they're only listening because they think you know something...
That's what happens when push linux on to the masses; they spit in your face. They make demands.
When you tell them, all they need to do is modify a text file with some colon delimited list or whatever - they turn red in the face and scream, "I WANT TO KNOW WHAT MOUSE MAZE I NEED TO NAVIGATE! I'M NOT A MASTER PROGRAMMER" & you think they're an idiot - and they pick up the vibes in your reply
You just don't use MS because you don't like menu mazes, or ding.wav (for that matter, you don't miss the games - the 3D mazes..)
But cheese is ok.
The pointing devices didn't get their name (esp. back when they were square) from their resemblance to little furry varmits, but from their users tendencies to act like certain cute fuzzy little pests with time.
Free software = RTFM.
Or maybe the all-powerful MSCE lord of the domain is right & demonstrates uncanny gift for higher level abstraction, getting so far yet actually needing a drawer-shelf to keep their keyboard 'out of the way'.
One day I'm gonna google for some error message & find 20 pages of results & 1 answer because 19 ppl didn't think to google for the answer before asking somebody else or because commercial interests have realized a potential support market for their snake oil reference books - and then - fuck this OS, just like win32.
I think it is a GOOD thing that Debian is hard to install and configure.
.. clean. However, in many major distributions userland /usr/bin, instead of /usr/X11R6. This turns /usr/bin and /usr/lib into a universal dumping
/etc/xinetd.d. One file == one service. Now
This is the way that Linux distributions should be. Before you go
"pffft" hear me out. I am an old-school UNIX administrator that dates
back to the SysVr3 days, and it's time I ranted.
Linux is nice. The kernel is very well done, has support for most
hardware, and is
has gone to hell. X applications are being put in
ground - the administrators nightmare. Some seperation is in order.
Glibc has bloated to 16 MEGS. By comparison, *BSD's libc is functionaly
equivilant and weighs in at less than one meg. The UNIX-like back-end is
being bent to the will of the user-friendly GUI front-end.
This kind of rot is BAD. There is nothing wrong being user-friendly,
however when it makes a mess of the entire userland system, it needs to
be thought out better. As an example, RedHat includes xinetd, configured
to load it's services via
this may be easy for the GUI inetd service configurator to modify, but
it makes configuring things by hand much harder. Editing a single file
is much easier than keeping track of 20 differant files and their
contents. This is just an example, and a rather mild one at that. The
rot goes much deeper, and not just in RedHat.
Back to Debian. I have no idea if this is their reasoning, but my
sentiments are this: If you can't do it right, don't do it. Making a
simple, admin-friendly configuration system that doesn't muck-up the
backend or bloat out the distribution is no easy task. They might
eventualy get it right, but not having it at all is MUCH better than
doing things like RedHat.
As for the install, this goes hand-in-hand with administration. If it's
not easy to configure and set up properly, it shouldn't be easy to
install. It's just begging for trouble to let a luser(def: somone who
can't RTFM and understand it) install an OS they can't properly secure
and configure. They will fuck up their machine, or worse get hacked, or
*gasp* turn into a wide-open SPAM relay. Probably a combination of the
three.
Debian is one of the most admin-friendly distributions out there. Gentoo
and Slackware are the other two contenders. They have done a great job
and we should give them a hand.
Hope this isn't redundant, but its worth pointing out that Debian goes out of its way to stay free. And it is rock solid stable. These two things mean a lot if you're going to use Linux long term. The "free" part, apart from philosophical issues, means you won't get hit in the future by some software vendor with its hand out demanding to get paid for an "upgrade" of formerly "free" software (this happened too many times with other distros). The stable part means, quite simply, that you can get work done. Debian does not have a monopoly on stability, but it is very stable, especially after being upgraded over a period of time (it STAYS stable).
I don't know why everyone whines about the install. The install isn't bad if you've installed a few distros before and accept most of the defaults. Oh, yes, be sure to select the 2.4 kernel flavor of installation and a journaling file system (e.g., EXT3). Anyway, they're revamping the install. If it's too much for you, use something else.
Red Hat is OK, but I was burned one too many times with RPM dependency conflicts. This kind of thing is very rare in Debian, if you take care to maintain your system "the Debian way."
Yes, I'd like to have xfree 4.2, KDE 3, Gnome 2 and the other latest stuff, and they're all available for Debian if you want to install experimental and unstable packages, but I don't, at least not on a production system. There's nothing missing from the stable and testing distributions that keep me from doing most of what I want to do.
Guess I sound a bit like a true believer, but damn, I like being able to turn off my entire network, say for a weekend out of town, and then turn it on and have every machine come up the way it's supposed to with no fooling around. And know that the whole thing will remain free for the foreseeable future.
Debian is not for the faint of heart. As a long-time UNIX admin, I'm a big fan of having the fluff removed from the installation. I love FreeBSD for similar rasons.
I'm glad there's still a linux distribution that doesn't make all the decisions for me.
Isn't that why linux people hate microsoft?? Have we come full circle here and we need our hand held?
I understand a newbie wanting a GUI to get Linux up and going. But Debian has NEVER touted itself as the OS for such. It's for people who are serious about using Linux in production environments.
-- People who hate Windows use Linux. People who love UNIX use BSD.
But....
There are two reasons why linux will never take over the world.
Here's the first one - geeky boys at play (sorry guys, hope you're not reading)
And the second one - while you linux losers are fricking around geting your silly distros running, out there in the real world, people are getting on with their lives and doing real stuff like writing their novels, typing their contracts, creating artwork, designing software and every one of the million and one things you can use a computer for once you GET A LIFE AND JUST INSTALL THE OPERATING SYSTEM AND MOVE ON !!!
I wonder where this apparent perception that Debian GNU/Linux for newbies (on the part of the reviewers) comes from. Debian is not for newbies. What, do these people think that because Debian sounds friendly, its somehow for newbies?
No, its not. Debian-based Lindows and Libranix are for newbies.
Debian is for experts. Anyone *can* install it and get it set up to their liking, but it won't be fun. It will require knowing your exact hardware specs, exactly what you want, and reading alot of manuals. The only people who will easily navigate their way around installing and configuring Debian are people coming from Slackware, Gentoo, OpenBSD, minix, or other hard-core UNIX-like OS' even more hard-core than Debian.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
While logically inconsistent, "its" = possessive of "it", and "it's" = "it is". Don't like it? Then use a different language :-p
I've tried 3.0 on a laptop. And I can tell you, it's no Slack 8.1. The installer sucks in comparison, and really needs to be dry-run about five times before you know what to do.
Plus, forget about doing dselect. Use aptitude instead. It's the closest to Slack's pkgselect (even though I wish Slack had dependency tracking).
Also, there's a limit on software unless you want to compile it. With "xv", you have to compile it, and it looks complicated enough.
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
Lots of views are expressed here, but as I just installed woody, I think many of you have missed some simply points:
I love the concept behind Debian. I want to have control over my system and over the TYPE of software I install. Debian will let me, but it punishes me for trying. I expect I'll be installing another distro shortly. I need to use my computer, not spend type getting it ready to be used.
Obligatory claim of competence: I started with slackware on floppies back in the 1.2 kernel days. I installed via floppies to bootstrap. I am not totally clueless.
Erskin
geek.
This about sums it up:
/dev/hdd wasn't set up, not even as a plain CD-ROM. The menus were all over the place. The fonts in GTK apps were hideously big. XftConfig wasn't set up to disable antialiasing for standard size fonts, nor were the workarounds for symbol and console fonts (mentioned here) included. Another bug.
kwrite decided it wouldn't display documents it opened and konqueror decided all pages should be 2000 pixels wide, even though the window was about 800.
Sound didn't work, and consequently the KDE bootup screen stalled for ages at the window manager stage while arts slowly died, then popped up a No Sound message box. None of the PPP connection tools worked when not used by root. None of the hard disk partitions were configured (even though they had been recognised by the piece of code that set up LILO). My CDRW at
It was a mess.
but you don't have a fucking clue, or you didn't bother reading the handbook(s) for 2 more minutes.
you don't have to use ports. use packages. precompiled tar'd and gzip'd binaries.
pkg_add sometool.tgz
Have you Meta Moderated recently?
This page was generated by a Barrel of Random Monkeys for qurob (543434).
Two Reviews of Debian 3.0
DebianPosted by michael on Sunday October 20, @10:04PM
from the you-must-be-smarter-than-this-stick-| dept.
FrankNFurter writes "Debian Planet features a review of Debian 3.0 from a user's perspective. Time for a reality check, debianistas." And twstdr00t writes "Linuxwatch.org has posted their review of Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 Woody. 'The package managment system is nice and easy to use. But the lack of good configuration and installation takes that all away from Debian.'"
I don't care what some online magazines say, I'm proud to be using a Distribution that has no commercial motives, and is completely run by highly technical volunteers. The Debian organization, from the Debian Project Leaders, to the people in #debian are just incredible.
The package management system is nice, and everyone stresses that, but that certainly is not the best thing about Debian, that just examplifies the well thought out design of the whole system.
This does not mean that Debian's lofty ideals are a failure. But it does mean that Debian has proven time and time again its inability to deliver the the goods.
It is time to forget a Debian. Wipe the slate clean and start anew. Jettison all the cruft and kludges and begin with a fresh slate. A new group needs to be formed, a group commited to realize what Debian strived for but failed to achieve.
Now I'd love to see any literature where the author uses "Jack's going to the store" .. now we might find ... "Jack's Jill is going to the store because Jack is too busy Jacking off on /."
I hear a lot of bitchin' about installations and configurations that newbies can't do. These rants are generally given by people who have some experience with *nix and Linux in particular. They assume that the newbie will be unable to do something, and bail. If the point of a review is to see what newbies can or can not do with the installer, why the hell don't newbies install the distro and tehn write the review? Why must it always be some second party speaking of a third party's capabilities, or lack thereof? Please people, stop the newbie this and newbie that until you actually find a fuckin' newbie and ask him/her.
Thank you.
Slackware forever. Honestly, what else would you trust when it absolutely positively has to be stable, secure, and easy
It will take more than this little bit of whining over GUI's to offset many excellent years with Debian on my machines.
I have a question?
/etc/make.defaults file and include gcc 3.2. After this, when I do an emerge vim, it will be compilied with gcc 3.2 rather then 2.9.5x. The latest version of gentoo comes with a much better c++ compiler but it also comes with perl 5.8 which is too incompatible with perl 5.6.
I do not have alot of time to do a linux installation. Is the debian installer similiar to gentoo in terms of configuring this file there, and write that file over here or is it more automated?
My only issue it seems with debian, assuming the installation is easier is that there are no master make files. For example with gentoo I can update the
http://saveie6.com/
Emacs and Vi, linux and gnu/hurd, Intel and AMD.
It's Linux and *BSD. Who's ever run GNU HURD(HIRD)? I certainly never have (at least not recently - I booted a floppy once). You might as well have said Linux/Plan9.
Then everything seems to fall into place. I have a lot of systems that were redhat or mandrake that I "declawed". How often do I need to change network cards or add new tape drives? I find it easier to edit that kinda stuff by hand. Redhat also is nice enough to have a semi-sane arrangement for various configuration files in /etc (/etc/sysconfig comes to mind).
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
Java is available in debs - not via the main Debian archives, but if you add the folloing line to your sources.list:
l ackdown.org/debian woody main non-free
deb ftp://metalab.unc.edu/pub/linux/devel/lang/java/b
you can then do apt-get install j2re1.3 for just the JRE, or apt-get install j2sdk1.3 for the full JDK. It even installs the Java plugin for Mozilla and Netscape 4.x (and if you install Opera, it can also use the same Java stuff).
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
I've been using Linux for almost 10 years; I started with SLS and Slackware, then Red Hat, S.u.S.E., and Mandrake. Aside from some brief flirting with Corel, I'd never installed Debian until two weeks ago. When I did, it was easily the least intutive install since Slackware days. NEVERTHELESS, once it's installed, it rocks... to the point where I spent this weekend upgrading my servers from RH 7.3 to Debian. The install is -not- for the newbie, but for someone who's familiar with Linux, it's an amazing system, and makes security maintenance an absolute dream. I'd love to see an easy-to-install mainstream Debian, so that the newbies could share in the fun. In the meantime, though, it's "more for me." I love Debian, and apt-get, in and of itself, isn't the whole deal. Rather, it's the design philosophy, of which apt-get is an integral part, but merely a part. Go Debian!
The spelling is the least of the problems these websites have. Most of them are so badly written in general that they're a real chore to read. The worst are the hardware sites like Anandtech, with pages and pages of stuff that a good writer could express in a couple of paragraphs. Reading these sites is like listening to a 14 year old blab on about his model airplanes or something.
Ok, I installed Debian 2.2r2 on a computer at my house.. This was a couple of years ago.. I have not had to re-install it at all since then.. It updated just fine from 2.2 stable to 3.0 stable.. I even went to 3.0 testing without any problems.. Now I have Xfree 4 instead of 3.. KDE instead of twm..
You just cant do that with any redhat, mandrake, whatever box.. you end up having to install from scratch each time.. To me this ends up being what I would call a "throw away" server just like M$ winders does..
Given the choice of a single install that is good forever (in computer years at least) or wasting my time re-installing and re-configuring my OS every 6-8 months.. ack what a waste!
Redhat is to beer as Slackware is to Marijuana as Debian is to Heroin What could be simpler than that?
I asked the webmaster of one of my favorite Linux sites why they stopped publishing reviews. The answer was that they were tired of visitors stopping in for a second, scanning the document, mixing everything up, and then writing negative comments about the review. Their conclusion was that it was too much of a waste of time.
So, I'm tempted to tell people who criticize these reviewers to do their own damn reviews. Better yet, I've started to use pclinuxonline.com and tuxreports.com to get a snapshot of things. I then add what distrowatch.com says and figure things out. pclinuxonline is mostly mandrake stuff and tuxreports.com is more open to different distros. distrowatch is pretty fact oriented. Use these and quit being a Luser.
AND we have a winner ! Congratulations. I've been waiting to see how long it would take before someone posted that Debian should be hard to install because a person that doesn't RTFM is a Luser.
Thanks. You made my day.
Poor Linux Aholes wonder why they only have 1% of the market share ! It's only a wonder !
I think the reviewer, while misguided in his criticism of debian, is not off the mark in feeling that debian needs a major overhaul (at least for the desktop). I've had a couple of friends who have sworn by debian as the way to go, but I have to say gentoo is the "expert" distro that has me the most excited? Why, because I get the feeling that the gentoo people are putting an emphasis on keeping their packages up to date. I think it's laughable that debian still uses a 2.2 kernel by default for desktop installs. Ugh. I like to live on the bleeding edge. Have the time I'm not even sure what the improvements are, but if there is a release out there with a higher number than the one I'm using, I'll begin eyeing it hungerly. I understand that debian is designed with stability in mind and that's fine. And if they wish to continue with that as their primary focus, then they will continue to be a server disto (which is fine, too). The fact is, we don't need 15 different "expert" distros for workstation and desktop users. One final note. Great work, debian people. It might have sounded like I hate your distro, but I don't. I'll keep logging into the debian server they got at school, and keep laughing at the people getting frustrated who are stuck on the solaris server.
I simply do not get this installer hangup everyone seems to have. Debian was the 2nd linux install I ever did when I started trying to use linux, some 4 years ago now. The first was a nice graphical RedHat install... which led to a system I barely understood and never used. A few months later I found Debian, and thought I'd give linux another whirl. Let me tell you I am so glad that I did.
It was keyboard based simple installer... and opposite of what other people seem to think it was faster, easier, and far more fun than any GUI piece of BS that other distros slap on their system. After installing Debian that first time I was hooked on linux for good. It barely took any searching the net to find what I needed to configure my new Debain system just the way I liked it, and the installer, my how that installer stayed out of my way and just let me get to the installing and configuring of the system that _I WANTED_. Not the system that some anonymous developers thought I would need.
For me Debian was really much more simple to understand, let me do what I wanted without fuss, didn't try to push anything on me, and quite frankly is the only reason I got hooked on linux.
Keep up the good work Debian, and no matter what some hairbrained reviewers and lazy Winblows users say, don't ever change you underlying principles. You make linux worth using.
- I love animals. I try to eat at least one a day.
It has been said even a chicken could install Debian since most of the work requires just tapping enter. These reviewers must not satisfy the minimum species requirement. Please replace user with more evolved lifeform and try again.
All I can say is I'm dumbfounded!
:-)
My first foray into linux was RH 6.2. I was running a P-100, 16mb RAM, 2mb PCI video card, 2GB hdd. Lets just say I had 1gb free(!), a GUI I couldn't get rid of and a cmd line that was unresponsive... It was 6 months later I tried again....... It was then another 3 months later with a friend who liked Debian sitting beside me that I tried again. The Text mode installer was intuitive and after the install, the box was like new, it flew!
I haven't looked back since.
I found RedHat TOO black box in approach, "stuff goes in", "things happen", "stuff comes out". I really don't like that, I had no idea what the OS was doing.
With Debian, I found it crisper, faster, more informative, and those damn dependancies, gone *bamph*.
I'm still a newbie, probably always will be, hell, I don't understand regex, I don't intend to. With that said though, I thoroughly reccomend Debian to all my friends.
So, thanks Panix, for the intro to Debian
----The Debian Project announced the release of Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 "Woody"
.deb packages and also provides an easy way to update packages for security or other reasons. The alien
on July 19, 2002. Woody is the first version of Debian to feature cryptographic
software. OpenSSH and GNU Privacy Guard are included by default, and strong
encryption is present in web browsers, web servers, databases, and so on. The
Debian Project's Social Contract
Any user of a Linux system isn't going to wait for a distro to "feature" a certain program to get it. Pointless
----ensures that Debian GNU/Linux will always be free. Debian has traditionally
been given some room on inovation due to the way it is developed by a team of
volunteer developers. But in order to compete with other distributions changes
need to be made.
Compete?!? Who says Debian is trying to Compete? (other than these fucks)
----Debian is available free over the Internet. You can download it from any
of Debian's mirrors. The Debian project does not manufacture CDs but you can purchase CDs from a number of CD vendors. Debian recommends first time installers purchase CDs and most vendors offer Debian for around $5 plus shipping, although downloading via the Internet allows you to only install those packages you really need and want.
I didn't know you could download the cd images off the net. All ther is at the debain site is a DOWNLOAD lonk, then proceeding that, asking if you'd like to download ISO's. (sarcasm)
----dpkg provides the lowest level of package management. apt-get is
an excellent utility for downloading and installing
command is available to install Red Hat, Stampede and Slackware packages.
I thought that Slackware WAS a debian without real package management. Great for servers though.
----The software included with the Disc 1 installation is very slim. (Trim about downloading lots off the net)
Try NOT downloading the Net install ISO, you dumbass. I guess he found that download page.
-----The Debian installation is a bit rough around the edges.
My ISO's didn't have edges.
----The install program is text-based which most other distributions have passed by. In a nutshell, the program is just unintelligent.
And so are you. Your point?
----There are no automatic detection routines for your hardware,
I'll give you that one.
----no automatic disk partitioning.
Absolutely not. I'm glad having to set it up myself.
----It took us several attempts to get everything installed and working correctly. Control is definitely given to the user, allowing you to change kernel module options and driver installations and the install program is very stable.
I've NEVER had the debian installer crash. RedHat and Mandrake installer is really bad about that. Actually, I like the SuSE console installer. Pretty clean interface. The debian dselect interface is disgusting.
----After the first reboot, the system walks you through setting up a root password and any user accounts you would like it create. apt-get is then configured, asking where you would like to retrieve your packages from: CD, HTTP, FTP. We downloaded our packages via FTP ensuring we had the most recent.
You bitch and moan about long download times, but insist to use net install. Get your story straight.
----Tasksel allows you to choose a predefined configuration based on what you will use your system for, from X Window workstation to Web Server. dselect offers the ability to add additional packages that aren't included in the tasksel profile. But dselect is horrible. Navigating it's 80's era interface is difficult for the average user if not impossible.
Do you mean the luser who downst know why his monitor isnt showing Windows, and you tell him to turn the power on "average user"? Or the "Average user" who cant install Windows, or the "Average user" who puts a disk to the side of his metal computer case using a harddrive magnet? Ahhhhh, that "average user". Speak for yourself.
----The X configuration isn't any better. We found no autodetection for your video chipset, forcing us to find the driver that worked for ours. We didn't receive any option to login using a graphical login, forced to login at a text console to type startx.
I didn't know that running xfree86setup was soooo time consuming. Oh, wait... You're an "average user".
----At the end of the installation, we found the whole proceedure to be far behind the competition.
I see no competition for debain. They're not compeating.REdHat is, but debian isnt.
----When using X, the default windows manager is TDM. We grabbed KDE 2.2 using apt-get. After restarting the X server we found ourselves with the full KDE desktop. The menu could have been better organized. Under several categories we found ourselves having to go 2 or 3 menus deep to get to the program we wanted.
My God! The travesty! Oh wait. How many menus deep is solitare? Sure doesnt stop my fellow students playing it in class.
----The first time we started KDE we found that our sound didn't work. Now having on of those wonderful on-board cards we didn't spend much time troubleshooting
it, but we do know it works with most other distributions that provide some
form of autodetection.
Figure it out, or start modprobing sound drivers in and wait to hear sound. Or if you want KDE 3.whatever, all you need is 1 lib package from unstable(libc6 I believe) to run it. Your choice wether you want to run unstable.....
----Debian runs smoothly and fairly efficiently on our test machine. "Woody"
is the first version of Debian to include a journaling filesystem, either ext3
or ReiserFS.
_-=YAWN=-_ It had BETTER run smooth. It's in stable, after all.
I'm wondering if Debian was ever really meant to be a finished, polished, complete distribution- instead, maybe we should consider it raw material from which more polished distributions can be built- like Linux itself. Debian just takes Linux a little further- then leaves it for others to finish.
I say this because there have been some really nice, slick distributions based on Debian. Corel was the first I can remember. It wasn't everyone's cup of tea, but it had a slick installer that did everything automagically, and some desktop enhancements to make it easier for the average Windows user to handle. Storm Linux was another that was pretty nice- again, a slick installer almost anyone could use, plus some nice system management and configuration tools, similar to Mandrake's. Now, Libranet seems to be doing good things with Debian also. You can read about Libranet here. Finally, I tried Knoppix the other day. It's a neat distribution that runs live from a CD, so one can try Linux without actually installing it. It has all the basics, and a nice KDE desktop. It's incredibly slick- installing, configuring, and loading itself from a CD faster than any of my Linux machines have ever booted. It detected all the hardware and ran perfectly on my laptop, with the nicest KDE desktop I've seen. I've been a Win2k hostage lately, so I've been loading Knoppix to netsurf and use some of my favorite programs, like Lyx. I urge everyone to try it, just for kicks.
All of these distributions are Debian, with the finish work being done by someone else.
So maybe we shouldn't think of Debian as a finished distribution, but as a toolkit- raw material for other distibutors to work with. Some have, and have done a good job.
(looks up from pdf files)Complete linux newbie says: I think the Debian installer is more useful than Mandrake and FreeBSD. Forget the reviewer. Read on to know why.
I teach M$ Office part-time to adults, everything from making a selection to full VBA progs. I can fdisk, regedit, poledit, etc. I had inherited enough old parts to build a P200/32ram box, 2 HDs(tot: 3gig). It begged to be the first Linux machine in my home network. This last week I decided it was time.
I did my research about different distros. Lots of reading. Talked to some ppl. I got Suse 8 Eval cd, and played with it for an hour on my main box. It looked good (KDE I believe), but I never saw the prompt. (don't forget, I don't know the *inx lingo yet) I was ready. Remember I had the Internet as my guide on the PC beside.
I burned the Mandrake 9 ISO. After chocking up over 30 hours, I gave up on Mandrake. Graphical install, text install, different options(like no KDE/Gnome), blah blah. Some choices, but not much choice. It held my hand, and couldn't help my old box. Frustrating. Even with all the reading.
I installed BSD with floppys/FTP. It worked. I stared at the prompt. I was scared. I read a lot more. I realized I was way out of my league.
I got the Linuxcare ISO (someone suggested it in conversation). Being able to boot to a full (small) Linux didn't help me.
I got the Debian Woody mini ISO. (sub 300mb) It was all text. It asked me questions. It worked. It rebooted and I scrolled through lists of packages (for about 2 hours) I didn't know about looking for things like Apache, mySQL, sshd and ICEwm, plus a few others. At the end it grabbed everything, told me about conficts (dhttp or some such needed port 80, but apache would use it, and the stuff wasn't even done installing yet!), asked my plenty of questions, (many I didn't understand, but for which there were recommendations) and then it was done.
Now, I don't even know how to show a list of files without it scrolling by, or search for a file. I have learned in the last day how to edit a config file (if I find it), use putty to connect (but now what to do I don't know) and a few simple *nix commands. Debian worked, period. I am on my way to learning Linux, thanks to Debian's installer. And I am not some computer science person who groks text and hash tables. I am a business person cum teacher.
Point being: Debian's installer should work for the reviewer who has been "using" *inxus for over 3 years. Don't believe the hype. I never used *nix before Wednesday, Oct 23, 2002. Now I am using Debian, learning something every minute I read and try.
Now if I could only figure out how to do a file find...(puts nose back to pdf files)
We would not recommend Debian to a new user, instead we would point them more in the direction of Red Hat or Lycoris.
;-)
And still that is exactly what I did. I had no (like in nothing) experience whatsoever with anything that hadn't written Microsoft all over it. And yes, Debian would have made my life easier if it would have done everything automatically (hardware detect, and as far as I'm concerned software detect based on my daily moods).
But... it didn't and I have to say that there hasn't been a year where I've learned so much about my computer as the last year. I apt-get my way around new package lists, I have a very nice looking system, which is very, very easy to maintain (apt-get dist upgrade.... yummy).
Then again, if Debian would feature a graphical install (there were some graphical deb based distro's) it would attract some new users. I don't know, if that would bring anything but more mails to debian-users though
Trip
The site where: "I'm right, as long as you ignore the things that prove me wrong", became a valid method of debate.
I like the idea of Free Software. That was the main reason I moved to Linux. I've come to appriciate the stability and power but the reason I switched was that it was Free Software.
/dev/whatever /dev/whatever1 /dev/whatever2 /dev/whatever3
/mnt/cdrom/root_tar_ball.tar.bz2 ... ...
:(
After getting my feet wet using SuSE I decided to switch to the distribution dedicated to free software namley Debian.
I had problems with the installation. I'm not going to go into them here. They have been enumerated in other posts.
I went back to SuSE. Later I tried Gentoo. Gentoo doesn't have an installation program. It does however have a social contract. It also lets you specify which licenses you allow.
A Gentoo install goes something like this:
From the bash prompt you get to after booting from the CD.
fdisk
mkfs
mkswap
mkfs
mount partitions
tar -xjvfp
make menuconfig
grub
I't all done from the command line. There is no installation program. If you are a Debian developer it should scare you that I find this method of installation easier than the Debian installer.
It's kind of funny that when people tell the Debianites that "Your installer needs some work"
the response is "apt-get is good!"
Yes I know apt-get is wonderful. I'm no longer stuck in RPM hell myself since I switched to Gentoo. The installer has nothing to do with apt-get.
When people say "Your installation program could be a bit more user friendly. Perhaps it could have hardware autodetection or at least some help text describing what the nv module is"
the Debianites respond. "I do NOT want to have to install X on my computer by default. Why would I wan't X on a server?"
Did any of you guys take a logic class in school? Even I, a physics student, can see the flaws your argument.
People are coming up with constructive critisism and you ar just not listening. It is really frustrating for me to see. Debian could be one of the great distributions that everyone uses
Newbie friendly installer doesn't have to mean it has to be less powerfull.
Can you bash script an install? Burn you own CD and let her rip.
Is it possible to install Debian without using the installer? Thats the way I'm used to doing things now. How difficult is it to get to a point where you have bash and apt-get? Do I have to use dselect when installing Debian?
Henrik Treadup
hetr9922@student.su.se
PS Its 7 am I've been up all night and I'm Swedish. I've probably misspelled things all over the place. How is your Swedish spelling?
PPS No I havn't created an account yet but I had to post. This is an issue I feel really strongly about.
Um, don't you mean 'poorly written'?
HTH
If it wasn't for OpenBSD's easy install I might still be using Windows.
I tinkered with Mandrake and Redhat for a while as Windows alternatives but didn't have great experiences. Then I stumbled on OpenBSD, did an easy slick ftp install and presto! Bye-bye Bill. The installer's fast and takes less brain cells than Linux.
(Don't get me wrong, though. I don't mean to put down Linux. I'm writing this on Redhat.)
Debian is for people who USE their computers, not lamers like this guy who go through Linux distros like candy. Yeah, the installer does suck. On the other hand, I haven't used it on my machine for 2 years now because the package system is so rock solid. (read: I have never had to reinstall Debian since I started using it) I use testing/unstable for 'production' machines and I rarely have ANYTHING go wrong. Worst thing that happens is you downgrade and wait a few days for that package to be fixed. And there are more debs than any other packaged linux software out there. over 10,000 in the official trees, thousands more unofficial / experimental / pre-release / third-party. Debian is a dream and I will NEVER go back.
The ducati on the otherhand is a little hard to maintain, but worth the effort.
For my $0.02 Debian looks like the worst of both worlds, arcane to manage, and not very fast, I prefer and useobsd & slackware. Ymmv of course, sane people who I respect use and like deb.
Linux is Linux, if One need clarify their dist: <Dist>/GNU Linux
bsds are of course just BSD
Lots of the to-and-fro on this topic has been about debian and new users and how debian is definitely not for novice users and suchlike. And thats perfectly good reasoning. But I am *no* newbie to Linux. I first installed Soft Landings on a 386 back in '92 and have been with Linux ever since, and I have huge problems getting debian installed, let alone *using* it! Ok so the install process is a dog as installers go, but thats not the worst part of it; the worst part for me has been that the install process frequently just doesnt work *at* *all*, not that its arcane, archaic or whatever; it JUST DOESN'T WORK sometimes, on some machines in some scenarios. And thats true of all distros to a greater or lesser extent. Mandrake to a lesser extent, in my experience, redhat a little more, debian a lot more. For example, I have a machine with a CD writer, IDE, slave on the primary controller. Shows up as /dev/hdb if I don't tell the kernel hdb=ide-scsi at boot time & load the modules, as /dev/scd0 if I do.
The debian CD boots fine, starts trying to install... and can't find any media on the CD.
I try a network install; I have a M$ machine running IIS so I copy the debian CD's to the ftp server and try an ftp install; doesn't work because the debian CDs have *symlinks* which are *needed* by the installer...
Now thats almost as dumb as redhat screwing up gcc, kde and mp3 support.
I've successfuly installed debian on the occasional machine, but the sort of problem I described above is not uncommon.
For those who would argue that debian is a distro for advanced Linux users who want more control over their systems, I would argue that Linux from Scratch (www.linuxfromscratch.org) would be a *far* better option than debian.
With a bit of scripting (which the advanced user should find a breeze) one could compile up ones own distro, *and* install the debian package management system (if one should so wish) overnight. Almost as fast as installing debian...
Want control over your system? Want a lean, mean system thats got just what you want and nothing else? Why go debian? Its not even *easier* than Linux From Scratch! :)
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
You get what you pay for.. surprise!
Debian isn't meant for Grandpa Wilbur to install on the old Packard Bell.. SPI has never tried to market Debian to any specific group, especially inexperienced users who want an easy install.
Anyone got this working? It would probably make apt-get useless (as all the packages are compiled with 2.95 *I think*).
While Debian does have a bit of work to do to get the installation process up to par, it is one of the absolute best systems to maintain and administrate. Many would consider apt as Debian's "killer app". On Red Hat you can have the best of both worlds. Visit http://apt.freshrpms.net.
--- Fox
Useful stuff! I never knew about the update tools. Cool.
Is it me or do most OS reviews these days seem to miss the mark?
I'm sure installers are nice and all, but when it comes down to it that should be the least significant part of actually *using* an OS.
6 months or 12 months down the road if you ask the RedHat reviewer who raved about the installer, or the Debian reviewer who complained about the installer how their systems were doing, i'm willing to guess that the Debian one is
a) still quite up to date and
b) hasn't had any stability problems at all.
Whereas the other one
a) May have been re-installed with a newer release and
b) May be experiencing dependancy hell.
Taking all this into consideration it seems absolutely ridiculus how much attention is paid to the installers during a review. Besides what percentage of Windows users have actually installed their own OS? So if typical end users are not the ones installing it, what does it matter what the installer is like?
I'd like to see reviews based on how well the configured machine operates from the day after the install on. I think that's far more telling about the quality of the product than judging it on the installer itself.
didn't take me long to get comfortable with Debian. It's a very well-designed
system. Yes, you have to have information about your system in order to
install it; so what? If you can't handle the fire, get out of the kitchen.
And stop whining!
Newbies!
Anything worth doing is worth doing badly -- G.K. Chesterton
hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
omg, that gave me one of those good crying laughs
fuck, shit, goddamn
Debian works fine for me. I have a well maintained, easy to upgrade GNU/Linux distribution that suits my needs perfectly.
As far as I'm concerned, it has succeeded.
Perhaps you should state your definition of success.
...qurob, 543434. You're fucked. HAND.
Probably not. Might be a good idea to learn what you're talking about before correcting someone else's grammar there, killer. There's nothing wrong with "badly written."
bahaha thats so true! but isnt that what its all about? for computer dorks, hardware is cool, we wanna know all kinds of interesting, useless things about it.
Configuring, now thats where the headaches begin.
I've used RH and Mandrake for a few years now, and when my ISP was offering unmetered downloads of all 7 cds I thought I'd give it a go.
As mentioned earlier the Install GUI is not pretty but it works, and I had an up an running system in very little time.
However things turned nasty when I tried to compile the NVIDIA kernel module and again for my SBLive.
Oh sure the system is up and running, but unless you love console apps its not much good for anything, until I find time to sit down and debug/re-configure it
Acaila
Growing Old is Inevitable; Growing Up is Optional.
...both in the article and in the responses I've poured through so far. This is my two cents. I claim neither to be a linux guru or a complete newbie, so here goes.
I tried installing Debian when 2.2r4 was the stable release and 3.0 was still, at best, a beta. This was roughly two years after I started using Linux. It had come recommended to me from several other linux friends for it's rock-hard stability and lack of dependency hell, which was a nightmare at that point. After trying to install several times, I could not get anything working and was naturally frustrated. So I had chucked it and gone back to what I've always liked as my distro, Red Hat.
I read the article, and I read many reviews which claimed that Debian was NOT a distribution which was aimed at home users and therefore an easy installer was not needed. Personally, I think a lot of that could be fixed by offering a choice at boot-up between the old installer for seasoned debian users and a newer graphical installer for new users. Just writing off newbies in the design of your installer is not the best idea if you have a reputation for being the best linux out there for stability.
The other point that the author of the first review made I take a bit of an opposite stance with. The author rips into debian because packages were out of date. Well, to my knowledge (and I could be way off base here) most debian developers are developers not because they're being paid to, but because it's their hobby, thier passion, what they just love to do. Most developers then have a life far outside of just developing solutions for the OS. They have jobs, SO's, Families, friends... things that might just take priority to making sure the latest version of random_package_X is default in the OS. The reviewer is upset because the installer is not as polished as Red Hat, SuSE, and Mandrake. Well, that figures. Those three distributions have a paid staff whose JOB it is to make sure things are polished and looking nice. People SHOULD take that into account.
If developers are doing this in thier spare moments they are, of course, going to give top priority to things like bug fixes and stability issues, which is probably WHY it has the stability it does. People who want to see if they can make a better installer should contact Debian and see if they can get some better info on how exactly they can assist.
----- I want my LART.
"Start off with a nice easy dist and as you grow you go towards Debian/Slack/Gentoo etc"
While I am all "grown", I feel no need to migrate to a less polished/harder to use distro. I can install and use literally any distro and I certainly don't need a a GUI to get my work done, but why stay in the stone age?
Advances in installs and config tools happen for a reason. There is nothing "better" about something being harder to use or master period. All products should be user friendly. Your forgetting that Computers are here to serve us, not make our lives more complicated.
Real progress is a newbie and an expert being able to accomplish the same task and letting the OS do the work. If I could wave a magic wand and make settings up a safe and solid web or database server as easy as falling off a log, you can bet your ass I would. If the tools you give someone are done correctly there is NO wrong way of doing something, it just works.
There will always be a place for hardcore users who want to "get under the hood", but real progress comes when you no longer have to do that and using a product becomes as easy as flipping on a light switch.
That is why I prefer the "easier to use" distros. Currently they may be making some sacificies in order to promote ease of use. But you know what? They are on the right track and I'd rather help them achieve their goal of becoming "light switches", as opposed any distro which requires a user to spend time mastering it as opposed to simply using it.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Yeah, just like "book" doesn't HAVE to mean that thing with binding and pages with writing on them. Except it DOES. Deal.
First i have to say that i am no wizard, guru or another higher lifeform... I am german and for that i was a great fan of SuSE back in the good old days of '95. My old notebook (Medion built '96) lead me to Debian: It was not possible for me to install SuSE 7.0 on that oldtimer with pentium 100, 24 Megs of RAM and no CDRom. (Further versions did'nt either.) Debian Potato was easy to install over LAN and now i am proud to say, that i have just installed a full Woody system, mostly over http. (You should see KDE working on that cute hardware.) Try that with SuSE. A last remark: Yast maybe great eyecandy and present a good structure of the packets, but for me the packet management of Debian is much more reliable! OT: Personal FIRST POST I just created a /. account to write that.
(Reading for 3? 4? years.)
I use Debian's installer approximately once per machine, for approximately twenty to sixty minutes of its operational runtime depending on its network connection. It installs the platform, and is never seen again. From then on, the machine runs Debian. Life becomes good. :)
I can forgive Debian's installer for being painful and outdated, since there are several versions of it available for download to support features that aren't available out of the box, and because it installs the single most reliable and best-performing Linux distribution in the world.
Red Hat 8.0 may be easier to install, but try compiling PHP 4.2.x with the compiler suite it ships with. Then try getting a 2.96.x series GCC installed on the box without just building it from scratch.
Yup, gimme my painful installer. It took all of twenty minutes to learn (simple is good, right? :) and it gives me a wonderful system that just works. Keep your shiny installers and bunk distros until they can produce a working system, not just an "oooh, purdy, it booted into Linux!" install.
Oh, and those who complain that apt is only a good package manager when you know the name of the package you're after obviously haven't ever tried apt-cache search.
Read my stuff.
Um, don't you mean 'poorly written'?
No. "Poor" is a polite euphemism preferred by your third grade english teacher, who was also trying to get you to say "please" and "mister." Now that we're adults, we can come right out and say "bad," "badly," and "go away, you fucking nebbish."
An alien ethos to non-debian users that require cds to upgrade thier systems to the next big number everytime. After a decade of windows/linux reinstalls most users consider the os installer to be a killer app for thier system, since they seem to spend allot of thier computing lives using it.
Hmm...Current date...Mon Oct 21 02:59:03 EDT 2002...
:)
"I never used *nix before Wednesday, Oct 23, 2002. Now I am using Debian, learning something every minute I read and try."
Let's be fair here....Since you've obviously mastered time travel, you have an unfair advantage
If you think Debian is hard to install, you need to know about PGI.
PGI is the Progeny Graphical Installer. It is slick and easy to use. If you run it, it will set up your computer with a perfectly good Debian system.
You do not need to run the official Debian installer to get a valid working Debian system.
The official Debian project does not need to integrate PGI before you can use it. You can use it now.
Note that Debian supports a huge number of architectures, but PGI is only available for x86 and ia64 (Itanium). I'm sure future versions of PGI will add support for other architectures.
Now, here is the part where I was planning to tell you how to get PGI. But I'm all confused now and I can't tell you yet.
It used to be that there was an ISO image of a PGI installer CD-ROM, available for download. You would just download it, burn it to CD, and boot from the CD.
Now, PGI has released their 1.0 version, and the downloadable ISO image is gone. Instead there are the tools to create your own PGI install disk. While this is totally cool, this makes it hard for me to tell you how to get a working CD image.
I don't know for sure, but I'm guessing that if you take the sample "configlets" from the PGI distribution, and build a PGI disk image using that, you might get the equivalent of the ISO image they used to offer. I'm planning to look into it, but by the time I figure this out, this news story will be long since gone from the Slashdot front page. So it goes.
It probably won't be long before you will be able to choose from several PGI-based installers (for free). But right now I'm not sure where to send you for an ISO image.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Ok--
I would have to agree with both reviews. Debian "seems" like a really bad kluge job for the installer. SLackware and Gentoo still have text installers, but Debian is lagging behind even them. I wanted to try Debian but never could get X working since I have a radeon 8500. After trying the experimental packages with no joy, I gave it the boot from the computer. Which is sad really cause I wanted in on the whole apt-get idea. But with X broken I really have no desire to go surfing for help in lynx (Sorry old school fellas). The lack of Xfree 4.2 was a HUGE factor in my decision to drop it. The installer was annoying, but not a stopping point. XFree at 4.1 was a point of no return. I understand the stability idea but 1 year is getting really slow. Espeically for a MAJOR item like X.
Cthulhu for president!
I could not care less about how Debian is unfriendly for new users. I find the distribution for production servers far better than a redhat or whatever. (Although redhat is finally catching up with their up2date facilities). People mention gentoo, which is probably a very cool distribution, but if I want ports, I'll use freebsd (which I eventually will).
I too like dselect, but my experience with other distros is very limited. Can anyone suggest (or make) a relative comparison of popular distros, above and beyond the install process?
My GF users Debain and has never touched a CLI let alone installed *any* OS. How many Joe Average users install their OS anyway? If they do, it will be a product specific recovery disk, so the whinge in the original article about installation difficulty is a moot point anyway.
And professionals? Anyone installing an OS more than a few times a year needs consistant hardware and a drive imaging program. Different nichess? Do a base install image and an run a script with apt-gets in it.
This preoccupation with the installer is ridiculous.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
still using mysql ??
Please take a look at a better DBMS...PostgreSQL.
Used to use mysql..waste of time.
I'll throw my hat in: I'd love to use Gentoo. Except they have a fairly spotty upgrade path. It's like a couple scripts written by a few guys who felt like doing something constructive one day. Might be integrated somehow at some point. Install the soon-to-be old version at your peril. Super.
I want to use Gentoo and Portage (both at home and at work). I really do, believe me. As a concept it sounds like a godsend. But I can't use Gentoo, at least not at work. Portage sounds great, until something which isn't included get installed, or someone needs the new version of the OS, or whatever.
I don't have time to mess with it at home. The days of tweaking an OS, as oppposed to actually using an OS, are long since past for me. I still have 13 floppies with Slack on them if want to spend time configuring instead of doing...
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Download that floppy image. Use Debian's bf2.4 floppy installation set (important). After you've booted and you're in the installer's menu system, go to a shell (Alt+F2), insert this floppy, and run 'extdisk'. I don't clearly recall what happens next, but it's pretty straightforward; you'll find modules for RAID and LVM, and configuration utilities. (I've only used this once.)
Of course, it'd be nice if this were part of the official installation system. Perhaps next release?
Those are the fucking idiots with unstable, hacked systems due to lack of security.
I'll take an updated, secure, established, intuitive, low-level interaction Debian over a POS shiny RedHat any day.
like debian-med or demudi?
i bet some people would find it usefull if debian would be splitten from the server-side and the desktop side - making something like a desktop-debian distribution coming with all the nifty xfree/gnome/kde goodies.
I've run RedHat since day 1, and I'm used to the way it works. Conversely, I find that Debian has strange ways of doing things.
All this shit about installing tonnes of crap in the default install is rubbish - nowadays at least.
Why doesn't Debian support Compaq Smart array controllers on it's boot floppies? There's not really any reason. (And don't give me that space issue).
Debian is good for stuff you want to run, and jsut type apt-get update && apt-get upgrade once in a while, but to most people, RedHat is Linux. How many times have you heard someone say "Have you got Linux 7.3?"
Get people using Linux for Gods sake. Then they will learn. Then you can give them unfriendly but powerful tools. But don't dump them off at the deep end first.
Mod me down, I don't care.
Get your own free personal location tracker
There is!!
try
apt-get install pentium-builder
the name is misleading but it is exactly what you want
There are only 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary and those who don't.
O the differences in these English distros...*sigh*
...and he grinned, like a fox eating shit out of a wire brush.
Now if I could only figure out how to do a file find... etbw
Proposed taglines for Debian :
Debian : the distribution you wished you had in 1995
Debian : All the hits of 1997 *today* !
Debian : for those who don't have anything to do today
Debian : The choice ! (kernel 2.2 or 1.2)
Want to know how cumbersome a Linux install was back in 1995 ? Debian is for you.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
I found KDE trying to tell me that the Irish currency was the pound, something which hasn't been the case since the Euro was introduced in 2000, two and a half years ago .
Man, this guy REALLY doesn't know much about Debian, does he? The Euro hasn't even made it into unstable yet!
Prior that we were a Red Hat shop. Since our software is high-performance e-Tailing tools for the Catalog and Mail Order industry we made the "switch" (heh) from Red Hat to Debian because of three words: Stability, Stability, Stability.
Was Red Hat stable? Yes, was it as stable as Debian, maybe. But it was clearly "apt-get" that really sold us as we're consistantly RPMing the crap on our existing RH 6.2 machines, it became clearly a time suck to keep up with patches/updates enhancements of all the software in RH and all the software that we used in our application.
I think its fairly clear that people (outside the Debian circle) are souring on Debian because they don't include the latest release of KDE 3.x, or the installer is clunky, or the package management system isn't like XP or Red Hat. But in the REAL WORLD, we could care less about that stuff.
Hell, I don't think i've ever installed Debian as a desktop as its own beast, if I wanted a distro for a desktop using Debain, I'd go over to Libranet or even Xandro's/Lindows.
But to me, thats stuffs unimportant for my business, so I'm not intrested in it. Debian 3.0 is perfect for a small to mid-sized busines running Linux as an application server or database server. Trust me, its perfect.
First of all, our needs seem to be the needs of a typical Linux shop (server based installations, running Apache, PHP and Java). We aren't a company that believes the desktop for Linux is that radically important. Maybe this is why we chose Debian in the first place -- the graphical wiz-bang installers for us sucked because we would throw marginal video cards into our machine -- text mode, thats what we wanted. Sure, some pundits could "ding it" for not including some later packages (i.e. gcc, latest kernel etc.), but thats not really what you'd want for stability, would you? If you really want those packages -- Just point your sources.list over to some mirror and "apt-friggin'-get" it... I don't understand the fuss, but hey, people love to belly ache.
I believe that Debian fills the holes that other distro's (RH, Mandrake, Suse et. al) seem to leave -- a rock solid distro with a simple text based installation with a great package management system. If your running a large server installation, why would you need anything fancier? I think Red Hat in particular try's to concentrate on the server, but i'm not convinced -- plus, damn to its too expensive, if I wanted to spend that kind of money, I'd run XP Server... Mandrake's cute, and Suse' looks interesting -- again all desktop stuff... Not really where Debian fits in.
Hey look Debian is not a Ferrari, but hell, to me its like that old 1980 Mercedes 300D that you can't stop running and you can STILL get new parts for... ;-) Its a workhorse -- its "Diesel babe". Thats what Debian is... we need these distro's out there folks. The flashy, shrink wrapped glizty ones are good to keep Linux chasing Windows in the hopes of catching it, but in the REAL WORLD we need the distro's you can pull of the net' install, and have it work... whats wrong with that?
http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai/
Peter
I personally have loved apt-get enough to become lazy. However, not everything is availible as a dpkg. I'll compile something if I dont have a choice, but most things can be gotten as i686 RPMs, which really is a better choice since debian is still stuck with i386 for most purposes. But having an apt-gotten base system leads to all RPMs being installed with --nodeps. So my problem with debian is, as well as everything the article mentioned (installers referencing documentation which could easily be parsed by the installer, dselect being the worst thing ever, the availible kernels all sucking- I dont even bother with that part anymore, keep a kernel compiled for this computer ready to install from over the network) package-managers dont know about eachother. If I can apt-get install rpm, why can't the debian version of rpm come with an interface to or converter for the apt database?
apt-get isnt that great by itself, either. A single broken package can destroy apt's usefullness. You can tell dpkg to forget about that package, but then any packages which were installed with it you need to find as well. When dpkg refusaed to uninstall gnome-terminal due to one of gnome-terminal's unmet dependencies, I was pretty sure that apt was no good.
Something which could make apt better is to keep track of all the "extra packages" installed with something. So if I say apt-get install gnome, and it wants for some reason to install gnome-games [!?], I can just say apt-get revert gnome and have all of gnome's dependencies that were installed with it go out too. Is there a way to do this? If not, I guess I can program a wrapper and put it on sourceforge or something.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
I installed potato that way from a CDROM, read the APT howto, and upgraded to woody from the net with no problems. If I need to install something that I want, apt-get will retrieve it in no time.
X worked right out of the box, and Windowmaker.
Debian does have a learning curve. There is a "Debian Way", and it is not the Redhat way, or the SuSe way, or the Mandrake Way. Read the website, and understand the thinking behind the distro, and how to maintain it. You need to learn about APT before you can grok Debian. When you do, system maintenance and upgrades become easy.
I think it breaks every single convention of user interface design: cluttered, cumbersome, unintuitive, complex.
I normally do a basic install and then I install whatever I need using apt-get, avoiding dselect like the pest it is.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I have worked with Linux since earlier versions (94). I was promoting Linux and using it as a desktop OS in 1995 (Slackware). My UNIX eperience is even longer.
,no. Pain,pain,pain.
I have been installing Debian for one year now.
I am an expert in user interface design.
The Debian installation is mostly OK, but you need to be an absolut pompous prick not to recognize that dselect is the most horrible piece of installation software ever devised by any human being. Confussing, unintuitive, clogged. No, no
Yeah, many thanks to the Debian guys for their efforts (I just install nothing with dselect and then get what I need with apt-get). But if you want to honour a frienship tell your friends the hard truth: dselect sucks (BTW I only buy Debian CDs with people that make a donation to the Debian team, before somebody criticizes my credentials as debianista).
Installation is lacking, and I am not talking about candy-eye-graphical-good-for-nothing interfaces. I am talking about a clean well tought deb manager application at the same level of abstraction of dselect.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Installation:
He makes comments extensively on SuSE, Red Hat and Mandrake, but shows no real understanding or explain his issues with the Debian installer other than that it "is the worst installer [he's] had to use." He also implies the base install is too simplistic.
Not to be overly critical, but he seems to have no real grasp at the concept of being bloatless. Installation requires the lowest common denominator.
My beef with the Debian installer is that it won't make a best guess on partitioning. Seperately but related, X doesn't attempt any autodetection, even the minimal stuff in XF86Setup from XF86 3.3.6.
Setup:
He complains that the setup refers you to documentation that is not yet installed. My understanding is you are expected to have a copy of the installation manual handy and at least have some idea what it's telling you. Yes, the menu options should be clearer, however, I disagree with the idea that software should babysit the user and hold them by the hand.
The writer clearly shows lack of clue and ability to RTFM with his comment about module selections.
Package Selection:
I just have to plain wonder if this guy has taken a good, long look at dpkg and apt-get.
I do agree with his beefs about the annoying help screens at every turn in dselect. Worse yet, I've been hitting space to clear the damn thing since bo, only to have them change it to enter this revision. Why can't it be both?
I've never heard of, or experianced, the kind of funkitude with failed packages cancelling the whole apt-get download like he claims.
The Installation Overall:
I'm with him right up until he suggested hiding things behind "Advanced" buttons. Sorry, but I don't see how making the installation less intuitive and more complex somehow magically makes the installer droolproof. I also don't agree with the idea of using branded names instead of driver names. Maybe have a help option that explains the branded names to the drivers, and definately an autodetect option. Don't sacrifice efficiency for those who know what they're doing in favor of those who can't be bothered.
I agree with the idea that dselect needs to be redesigned, however, making it more like a GUI will only confuse users expecting it to work just like a GUI, and will actually make dselect more painful to deal with than vi, instead of slightly less painful.
The Configured System:
I'm just going to summarily dismiss all bitching about KDE. KDE sucks. Gnome sucks. CDE sucks. Cocoa sucks. Microsoft Explorer sucks. All these systems are too baroque, adding unneeded complexity for the user to wrap thier brain around instead of presenting them with the actual system. Sorry, but mv, cp, ls, find, and a newbie oriented text editor aren't that hard to learn how to use. I mean, my compuphobic art-geek sister can figure it out. Hell, my WinBigot(tm) roommate was even able to figure out that much.
Debian has pretty complete documentation of configuration files in the comments in those files. I haven't had to look in man section 5 in a very long time, around the time I had to reinstall due to accidentally deleting /usr back in early 1998 thanks to improved documentation in
comments. Control panels are thus very much dead-weight.
Conclusions:
I have to seriously question whether or not he knows what he's talking about about RPM. I've used RPM recently. It's still painful to use and terraparsecs behind apt-get *still*. Even with urpmi. apt-rpm segfaults on machines with low RAM. Package names are *still* not standardized. Versions still conflict badly, and upgrading the system is still a "fsck me harder" experiance.
I strongly disagree with the idea that we should create yet another method for configuration. No. Webmin works. Linuxconf works. $EDITOR works better, and the config file comments usually have more helpful information than webmin and linuxconf do, and it's usually faster.
The Debian Desktop idea is almost a good one, but then again, that's why themes.org exists. Why duplicate that effort here?
Granny proof: No. I'm all for accessiblity, but you should never stop learning. Plus, trying to granny proof anything leads to bloat and a shitload of bugs. Need proof? Look at Gnome. Look at KDE. Look at Nautilus. Take a long look at Microsoft Explorer. Notice how they all fail at that goal, and notice how buggy and bloated they are. This is not an honorable or obtainable goal, time would be better spent trying to find lost cities of gold.
Help us build a better map!
>I remmeber OpenBSD install. . . over ftp. Half an
:)
>hour finding documentation on partitioning info.
You should have bought the CDs
The CD comes with an annotated transcript of a typical i386 install. That may not sound helpful, but it makes the install very easy.
I tried to install it 3 times, and it failed every time with clashes of some sort in the package installation process-- even when I only selected the aboslute bare minimum of stuff to install.
I went back to slackware-- which has been easy to install since... 1996? earlier than that?
Why some people are inclined to give Debian, such a wonderful work, a bad name?
That bullshit about using soimething else if one can't figure out the very defective piece of software that dselect in particular, and the install process in general, is becoming a very tired horse that is just an excuse for lack of interest.
People are not stupid, the previous poster and myself are giving Debian its fiar chance. It is great, stable and all the rest, but I am not prepared to hear that bullshit about installation not beinn important or that people should move somewhere else.
All what it takes is to rethink the process and presentation of the installation tools (I am not talking about graphical installs, that is unnecesary and obtrusive, just clear ones: dselect is broken: deal with it).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
It is my belief that most people simply do not like Linux anymore. At least not the Linux environment in its true form, instead they rely on extra software to take away all the hassle which comes when you administrate a Linux system (yast, linuxconf, etc.). Allthough I don't claim this to be a bad development (personally I think it is though) it is becoming pretty clear that just because of this development people completely loose track and focus of what Linux really is.
When taking a closer look at Debian GNU/Linux you will see its a completely free distribution which is composed of Linux software. Software like XFRee86, KDE, but also shells, shell utilities, and so on. Allthough Debian has provided in some installation guide most of it is done the Linux way, apart from compiling your own software that is.
There is a lot of complaining about the way Debian is installed but I truly wonder if any of these complaining people have actually bothered to, for example, grab a copy of XFree86 directly from the XFree site in order to set that up ? Because that is exactly what you get when you use Debian, you'll get Linux in its purest form. The Linux OS with access to all the major software packages out there. And yes, perhaps the Debian team could have put some more effort in the installation process, perhaps.
But have we allready forgotten that Linux isn't Windows ? Who cares about the harder / rougher installtion process, once its installed then you'd normally don't have to bother with installing for the next 5 years. And the configuration part... True, it doesn't give you nice hardware detection and all of that. Instead effort and attention has been put in other aspects. For example the option to keep your system running for those 5 years I mentioned above, even when you do want to upgrade to the next release. And I don't mean pop in the CD and select upgrade, I mean keep your server running while the next release is being downloaded and/or installed. Try that with RedHat or SuSE :)
In conclusion; I think people are losing focus to what Linux really is. Its nice that there are companies out there investing in Linux and developing nice tools to make configuration and installation easier. But this development does not take away the mere fact that Linux itself is still a Unix based environment which is (and should be) configurable using vi at all times.
And when a certain distribution gives you just that then its a little bit disturbing, IMO ofcourse, when people start complaining about how hard it is to install and configure. Because in the end it seems these people don't realize anymore that they are complaining about Linux itself.
Xandros, based off Debian, ships this week. If it's done correctly, it'll offer all the Debian goodness, with an actual ease-of-use for end-users. I am looking forward to it, to see what they've managed to do with Corel Linux.
"Xandros Desktop 1.0. The product, due to be released on September 30, 2002 and available for purchase within three weeks after that date, is built upon Linux kernel 2.4.19, XFree86 4.2, Debian 3.0, Corel LINUX 3.0, and enhanced KDE."
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
It is worth noting that the review on Debian Planet was written in response to a post about Debian losing mindshare on the very same message board. The poster was bemoaning the fact that Debian 3.0 had not been reviewed by anyone and was being ignored. Thus the review is written, and the review is harsh. It is also very true! I love Debian no doubt, but the install is the worst out there and if you are looking for current everything you should be looking at Gentoo or RH 8 and passing Debian by. Most people use Debian for a reason and are more than willing to forego the latest packages and are more than capable of dealing with the incredibly flexible yet entirely unfriendly installer. In short, they know Deb's shortcomings and are willing to accept them because they recieve that which is truly important to them by installing and using Debian: stability and freedom. So is it reasonable to ask that all of the non-Deb users who seem so intent on "fixing" Debian just shut the hell up? Please? RH 8.0 is waiting for you, SuSE has heard your cries, Mandrake is even fixing problems you have not voiced yet so please use them instead. Debian will be fine without you, stable, free, and boring as hell.
I know this is not a mainstream application, but I would like to mention that the Debian s390 port is great. The install was as easy any of the other s390 distros we tried (SuSE, RedHat). And while the packages we care about (PHP, Apache, MySQL) might a minor version behind, they were as new or newer than the ones include on the other distros.
The thing has been rock solid reliable. I can create an identical installation with all the same packages by typing in a couple dpkg and apt-get commands. The only problem I've hade was answered one day after I posted it to the s390 mailing list.
Best of all, it didn't cost us $30,000 like RedHat wanted to charge us.
"On average, a package takes about twice as long to download in source form than in binary form. Also, source takes about as much time again to build. So all up, you're looking at about 4 times as long to install a given Gentoo package as the same package on Debian."
No. You are looking at about two times as long to install the package.
2*dwn_ld + 2*src_build = 2(dwn_ld + src_build)
-- jetlag --
Not really very in depth reviews, were they? A few difficulties with the installer, some font trouble and suddenly they call Debian useless.
No, Debian isn't perfect. No, I wouldn't recommend a newbie install it. But, if you are an actual linux user, rather than someone who just has a Linux partition on their machine and never uses it, Debian is far better than the reviews suggest.
The reviewers are making the classic mistake of confusing ease-of-learning with usability. If something takes a week to learn, but saves you a day on the time to do a task everytime you do it from then on, then if you're going to do the task more than seven times in your life it makes sense to spend the time learning.
What's all the hoopla about? Debian was EASY to install, it takes NO extra special skills. I swear the mainstream bitchers are all a bunch of whiny babies these days, haven't you ever installed DOS 6.22? Debian is no harder than DOS 6.22. All the whiners should spend a little time learning about apt then shut up. I say anyone that says that, "Debian is hard to install." is an idiot. So, what that tells us is. There are a LOT of idiots out there.
There seem to be a lot of people arguing that Debian's install gives you more power, because it gives you more choices. As a longtime Debian user (who has learned to live with the installer, but who still hates it), I fail to see how having Debian automatically figure out what video card I'm using takes away any power from me, especially if I can always change it later. I've seen many gripes about Mac OS X, for example, but nobody (even Debian users) will complain "The install doesn't let me pick my video card by hand!".
And this isn't just for hardware choices. Pick some reasonable defaults. (How? Find some human interface folks, and do some user testing). I don't want to be bothered for every little thing.
I was fine with dselect until I read your posting and tried synatpic. Wow. Do they have anything like it in the other distros? In the Windows world?
Maybe the reviewers should talk to a few people who use Debian before doing a blind review. Hmmm, maybe there should be a 'Getting Started with Debian'. Maybe there is.
Its nice.
Editor: please update the topic to reflect this addition.
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
Debian is a fine distro, but most people dont give a damn about package management. Ultimately every package management sysytem works! The specifics are irrelevant. Debians problem is that it is a 8000 package distro which makes keeping it up to date immpossible. Slackware is more stable slightly more up to date and while it has a crappy package management system its still relatively easy for anybody with a brain to keep updated. I for one have no problem manually compiling packages or using binaries. I think RPM based distros like redhat are all to bulky to begin with. Slack is just beautiful in its simplisity and it never fails to work.
I've been using Debian for a while on an old (circa 1998) Digital alpha workstation and it is rock solid and was not *that* hard to install.
Amen. My first exposure to Linux was Debian on an old 68040 Macintosh. Debian is, as far as I can tell, the _only_ English-language distro for m68k architecture. Sure, the installer was a little rough, especially since some options didn't apply to the hardware platform I was using, but everything installed and worked just fine.
If nothing else, the support for other architectures that the Debian project shoots for is invaluable.
--saint
It is not impossible to use. No other installation system I've used gives you as many options for data sources as debian does. The network installation alone, in my opinion, makes it my choice distro. When I use bf2.4, I can install the entire system using nothing more than 2 floppies. Alternativly, there are 11mb netinst CD images with all the drivers included. I would rather have debian's installation method than being forced to download 650mb worth of packages I'm not going to use, plus having to own a CD-Burner (which I don't, and have never needed to thanks to debian). Personally, I'd rather not have a graphical installation. And I'd rather have functionality than play tetris while my distro decides what packages i do and don't want.
2*dwn_ld + 2*src_build = 2(dwn_ld + src_build)
No, because it was stipulated that the Deb system is building from binary packages -- no compiling.
My opinion of Gentoo: Very nice distro, and one I'll use personally, but it's not for anyone who wants their computer to Just Work.
"Evil company X is threatening to restrict our rights! Let's all get together to stop--OOOH! SHINEY!!!" -- AC
Source takes twice as long to build as what? Binary? Last I checked, you don't build anything BUT source.
All the "big" packages that take forever to compile have *.deb's...so anything else should be well within your means to compile...
Everyone is saying "Debian is not for newbies". Well I, for one, disagree.
Three(four?) years ago, I decided I wanted to "Learn Linux". I didn't jsut want to "use" Linux, if I did, I would have gone RedHat or Mandrake. No, I chose Debian because it would help me learn how Linux worked.
The stable dist is rock solid. You KNOW everything is going to work together. While learning, I know if it isn't working its MY fault. I would hate to have dealt with missing libraries as a newbie!
Also, it IS hard to install and it DOESN'T magically detect and install/configure everything. No better way to learn than beating your head against the monitor for a few hours a day.
It took three months for me to get a fully functional desktop, but I'll tell you this: I know Linux far better than my friends who started with RedHat.
Snazzed
Get a life, man.
FWIT, Bob
This post encoded with ROT26. If you can read it, you've violated the DMCA. Handcuffs please, sergeant.
Well, to be fair, I never use dselect, other than to jumpstart the installation process after I've run 'dpkg --set-selections' to install a new package list. The few times I have used it, I haven't particularly liked it. Apt, however, is an amazingly convenient and powerful collection of software.
With Red Hat 8 I can install the entire system over a network (FTP or HTTP) using 1 floppy and it uses the GUI installer. I hope the network installer wasn't all that was keeping you on Debian, because if it is it's time to switch.
Only new people seem to use dselect. It is going to be replaced with aptitude which is much better but I expect most people won't use that either.
Every Debian user I know (myself included) upon installing a new system installs the minimum, logs in as root and types something like:
# apt-get install x-window-system task-c-dev vim
New users and reviewers never seem to clue into the fact that apt is a really fantastic package managemnet system and dselect is a really bad front end which should be avioded.
The installer that one of the reviews complained about admittedly isn't very good either. This is why it too is going to be replaced for the next stable release.
Link please
http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/linux/RHL-8.0-M anual/install-guide/ch-guimode.html
Read the entire chapter and you will see you simply need a diskette with the bootnet.img on it and off you go.
dselect must be learned.
Remember the first time you picked up vi or emacs?
Once you spend the 20-30 minutes reading and playing to get familiarized (if you haven't already), you should realze that while unituitive at first, it gets the job done. The whole apt-get/dselect system also does a great job of conserving resources, a must for a low-budget volunteer group.
Want a more user friendly interface? You have ten fingers and an internet connection, why not write one?
:wq
typo --> http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/linux/RHL-8.0-M anual/install-guide/ch-guimode.html
I'll try it out. Thanks.
I've been installing RedHat as a network install since the 5.x series ...
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
I have about 10 years of experience with Unices. I've worked with Irix, SunOS, AIX, OSF, HP-UX. I've been working with GNU/Linux since 1994, and I've always been a Slackware fan. Last year I changed my job and went to a place where everything was Debian GNU/Linux.. In the beginning it was kind of difficult to me, but as learned and learnd the distro, I started to love it, and now even my desktop PC has a Debian. In the process of sysadmining around I got in touch with RedHats (yeah, well, politically correct) Trough my sysadmining the only difficult install was 2 years ago with OpenBSD.. and I'm still ashamed of me for not able to finish the installation. *sigh* Two months latter I did it, and now I have a bright shiny OpenBSD name server.. The point is, I cannot understand all of you who think there should be an easy .. no really, what do peaople need ? a) you're a J.R. Random User -- pick a distro (RedHat 8.0 is quite shiny), use office tools, watch movies, play Quake with a mouse click. (I'm not a zealot, I can understand end users need easy to use OS) b) you're a J.R. Random Sysadmin - (as i'd like to think of myself) -- I need to boot a minimal installation and add whatever i need.. as someone above pointed, we usually don't need xlibs.. why the hell i need a GUI installer ? I know what I am doing, and if there is a problem, i'd like it'll be me to fix it, not the installer to guess ... *sigh* .. I'm still a Slackware fan deep inside.. but when you have 50+ machines, you cannot update them the slackware way.. not that easy as with Debian.. I still think a crafted production server can run under Slackware, having another two (testing and development) machines under slack.. or OpenBSD/FreeBSD of course.... but as long as I don't have unlimited resources, lack of machines, deadlines.. Debian GNU/Linux is my choice.. the way it is.
Thank you RMS.
just my $0.02
Progeny has just released a new ISO for a woody install using PGI. You can find it at http://archive.progeny.com/progeny/pgi/.
We heard your plea.
At least you didn't switch for developers, developers, developers.
You Have 34572 distros around the world if you see 70% are Debian based, so if the developers of that 70% debian based distros work for the debian distro it self things stay better!You have the REDHAT last version that seans like Windows
so I already say: Lets work as a single one a show
to some unnecessary critics that Debian is the best distro and in conparation of some of the most know and so called best distros that are just a trap for true lovers of OpenSource and truly free software
Debian kick you mama Ass