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Introduction to Debian
[vmlinuz] writes "SitePoint has an article that I wrote that introduces Debian and has guidelines on installing it. This could be usefull for managers, new users and other people that may be interested in using Debian." And honestly, who among us isn't interested in using the obviously superior Linux Distribution against which there can be no other contenders? (Oh dear god don't flame me! It's a joke people!)
Gentoo is gonna get modded down.
*dives for the bunker*
You know you can't say something like that around here!
My biggest complaint w/ debian is the slow release cycle. I'd like to be able to pin the newest KDE/gnome/whatever to stable and do an apt-get upgrade without breaking a million things. Last time I pinned kde 3.1 and updated I spent three days finding broken stuff and fixing it.
And yes, I am aware of the other debian-based distros that are more up to date, but they're all (to my knowledge) pay distros, and I am looking for something cheap/free.
FreeBSD for the impatient.
to quote the article: "There is a distinct possibility that some Linux vendors may close up shop, change their business direction or adjust their practices in some other way. Thus, the distribution you use today may not be around in 10 years. "
I thought the beauty of open source was that even if the original author (be it a natural person(s) or a company) decides to no longer support a project that the source is there for you to look at and provide your own support.
Accentuate the positive, don't waste your mod points on the negative.
No, here's a joke.
How many Debian users does it take to change a lightbulb?
Just one, but he has know how to apt-get install liblightbulb1. apt-get install light-switch-client if you want to be able to turn it on.
Oh, please... It's a joke, isn't it?
I'll be glad to see if there's any managers USE Debian. Managers INSTALLING Debian... ?? Wow! It's so... "news that matters".
--
Error 500: Internal sig error
Read the parent to understand why.
and while we're at it, what's lignux?
Keep your packets off my GNU/Girlfriend!
And honestly, who among us isn't interested in using the obviously superior Linux Distribution against which there can be no other contenders? (Oh dear god don't flame me! It's a joke people!)
:-) Debian just needs to get over the fear of anything new, such as anything graphical. Judging by unstable it looks like they are moving in the right direction.
Well if debian could get their installer and hardware detection right I don't know how far off that statement would be
Debian is sometimes superior to other Linux distributions but IMHO the installer is just horrid. When compared to other Linux installers, notably RedHat (which is very nice), it fails. Other than that, Debian seems to be the way to go for any would-be Linux guru.
For those turned off or scared away by the debian install process (which still seems stuck in the 90's. Jesus, did I just say that?), grab a Knoppix CD.
No, seriously. I don't run debian primarily because I don't want to go through the install process. I don't know what chipset my nic has, and I really don't care to know, know what I mean? Ditto with everything else.
I've been using flavors of RedHat, culminating with Redhat9 that's currently my Linux of "choice", mainly because Redhat offered superior hardware detection/setup. But, I've always had to tweak a bit here and there to get it working nicely.
However, with the advent of Knoppix, I think that's about to change. I popped in Knoppix 3.2 today for the first time to see what it was all about. The hardware detection on this LIVE CD is absolutely.. superb. It recognized and setup my Orinoco Wireless card. It found and mounted my Sony Cybershot Camera. Jesus, it even found and setup my Wacom! The only thing it didn't do was give me dual-head support OOB, but I don't think I know any distro that does that. But that's okay, fortunately I know how to set that up myself. It comes with KDE, it looks great, it just WORKS. And because it "just works" I'm really tempted to wipe RedHat off and do the HD install of this.
Some notes that I've come across, though: As Knoppix uses a special blend of testing/unstable (or something like that), it's really hard to do dist-upgrade and what not without downgrading your desktop. I heartily recommend reading through the docs at the Knoppix website and finding out what issues may remain. As a desktop Debian based distro, though, I think Knoppix just plain rules.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
Unstable really isn't that bad. No worse than Gentoo for example.
TODO: Something witty here...
I'm undisputedly a Slackware geek but I have to admit that Debian really is a better system. Whenever I feel the need to deploy some kind of GNU/Linux application, I find time and time again that it's easier and faster to do in Debian. More and more these days, however, when I need to deploy some kind of *nix application FreeBSD beats all the competition hands down as a platform. It's simply superior.
P.S. Redhat is no good at all. It's not that I'm being close-minded, but every single time I try to use Redhat it ends up wasting huge amounts of my time.
LEARNING, n. The kind of ignorance distinguishing the studious. A. Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
Uh, get the 10MB bootflooppies netinst cd. Install woody.
/etc/apt/sources.list
$EDITOR
Replace all instances of 'stable' with 'testing'
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
Congradulations, you're running testing.
TODO: Something witty here...
Slackware for everything! Use only 'cuz it's l33t.
Karma whorin' since 1999
My own experience with Debian:
:-)
I have a number of longtime hardcore Linux fans, most notably my (now) roommate. After being ridiculed for a long time about my use of Windows (especially my need to reinstall it every three months, due to it's tendency to crap out, regardless of which one I used--9x, 2000, XP), I decided I'd try this so-called "Linux".
So I asked for a copy. Not even being aware that I had a choice of distributions, I took the first cd set given to me--"Woody", at that time Debian's testing distro, later to become Debian 3.0.
At first, I kinda freaked. No pretty graphical install, but it really wasn't so bad. I've been through worse in DOS. The instructions were pretty straightforward, though I did have to ask my friend what NIC driver to use (it was tulip). But after about an hour, I had a working system, with WindowMaker as my default window manager, and witha simple "startx"....
It worked.
And didn't stop, ever. It's never even paused on me. Since then, I've taught myself every intimate detail of linux in general, and even tried a few other distros on my other machines, but always end up going back to Debian (though now I'm running unstable--I like to live dangerously). Even used it to turn my crappy 486/DX66 Toshiba Satellite w/16MB of RAM into a useful internet terminal for my living room.
It's not the easiest way to start, but when you're done, you'll have a good grasp of everything you'll need for an everyday system, and adding features or building a custom "utility system"(email server, firewall, etc.) is just an apt-get away. Overall, I'd highly recommend it to anyone.
Unless you're really -that- lazy.
[este]
Recent gem article's from them include:
"image resizing in php" that is actually just a trick to use the height and width properties of the <img> tag to make the browser resize the image. "I don't feel like having 4,000 different thumbnails on my server for each product..."
And, "practical web design with tables" for people who think "CSS is too hard"
I've been using Debian GNU/Linux (unstable) for the last 3-4 years and it runs perfectly stable. I update my system almost every day without dependency problems - I have never reinstalled the system from scratch since the package managment (dpkg/apt-get, whatever) takes care of my system and doesn't mess up anything.
The old Debian installer is somewhat technical, but who doesn't like that? I find the old installer much more easy to use than Windows XP's setup. If the only reason for hating Debian is the (soon to be deprecated) text mode installer, you really should just run away.
Debian is the superior distribution!
-- 6 times 7 equals 42
GNU/Hey GNU/stupid GNU/it's GNU/supposed GNU/to GNU/be GNU/Debian/GNU GNU/Linux/GNU.
scott
To list installed packages, there are some tools that will do that for you... I would just do this: /var/db/pkg/ | grep ':'
ls -R
And for the kernel compile, it really *is* a walk in the pack... but don't forget there are new emerging technologies that make installing KDE, X and mozilla a walk in the pack too...
For example, DistCC is a cross-compiler that allows you to distribute your compiling over multiple boxes... those boxes can be running any distro that has the same compiler and libc running on it...
We (at work) use the old boxes on our network as a compile farm and it works darn well...
we have 2 Athlon XP-2400 w/1Gb of ram for the workstations and 3 older machines that help out with compiling... We can get all these packages installed in a few hours...
Another utility is CCache... it's basically a caching utility that caches your compiles on-the-fly so if you emerge a large package again,
your computer will only have to compile the parts of the source that have changes...
this saves hours when upgrading packages...
But, for those of you who want the bleeding edge without risking instability, Debian does just fine there if you know what you're doing. Go ahead and jump to unstable. Seriously!
The only thing you're missing is "apt-listbugs," which does this automatically with every update...
Before starting installation, apt-listbugs fetches all the bug reports for versions between your current version and the target version. We can see that two bugs have been closed (fixed by later versions, or the bug reports were bogus), and we see that the tetex-bin bug is still open.
In this case, we'd type 'h tetex-bin' to hold the broken package and proceed with a perfectly usable system.
Of course, this still leaves you in the position to be the one in ten thousand who finds a critical bug on installing any given package. If that happens, be a Good Debizen and use reportbug so the next guy is notified. Further, if you flag a critical bug, it's rare that it isn't fixed within a couple hours, even at 2am on Sunday. Once you've reported your bug, go ahead and roll back a version and carry on until the developer closes the bug -- if you used reportbug, you'll get an all-clear email automatically when he or she closes the bug.
With unstable and the apt-listbugs' automatic reports, the chances of ever winding up with a broken system are exceptionally low. Showstopper bugs are rare even in unstable -- maybe one package update in five thousand. But, with thousands of other users snarfing packages and reporting any bugs, the chances of your being the one to discover breakage without apt-listbugs warning you first are virtually nil.
All that said, if you can bear to be a week to a month behind the bleeding edge, you can use apt-listbugs with testing as well. The chances of getting a broken system with testing and apt-listbugs are about the same as the chance of Windows Service Update not needing a reboot. Virtually nil.
Gentoo also has a nice separation of "cutting edge" from "bleeding edge".
If you want to see packages that are still in testing, type ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" [or ~your_platform_name, like ~ppc] emerge -Up world
debian isn't just a distro. it's a lifestyle.
Wimps and couch potatoes with their grey tasteless distros don't understand the pleasure a good distro gives. We offer two exquisite distro flavors for the linux user with style:
- STABLE: coke drinking folks will never get it, but programs are like good red wine. They get better with age. That's why we only include very old programs in this distro. If you think that these programs are outdated and full with bugs that have since then been corrected in newer program versions, you miss the point: this isn't a fast-food distro. It's a distro you use at candlelight.
- UNSTABLE: this is our distro for the fast and the furious. If you're complaining about this distro and saying that Mandrake and Gentoo both have up-to-date versions that, unlike debian, aren't actually "unstable", you miss the point and you're most probably a wimp. This distro isn't for couch potatoes but for people who love the thrill of the risk. For people who play carmageddon for real in their SUVs, go bungee jumping and skydiving and just occasionally forget to take a parachute. But that's what makes the kick of debian unstable.
Debian isn't just a distro. it's a lifestyle. It's what separates the men from the boys. Go download your copy from www.debian.org now
Debian Developers usually get humiliated in public if they upload a broken package to unstable without testing it. Of course, this is somehow proportional to the importance of the package, but if a Developer somehow manages to mess up other packages, too, he will have a hard time defending himself.
Michael
Heh, I've justing finished writing an article about the problems with APT (What's wrong with APT?).
Because the 'main branch' is 3.0 aka woody aka 'stable' and debian does not introduce stuff like Hardware Detection in Point Releases ala 3.0r2.
Be assured that there will be automatic Hardware Detection in the next stable release (whenever that will be). It has been in the new, still alpha, Installer for months now I think.
Michael
Try Debian Help or Debian Community or even one of the mailing lists. And, of course, you can usually get instant answers by asking on irc.debian.org.
There is plenty of good community support available for Debian. The only time I've ever seen anyone suggest "RTFM" is when someone posts nonsence questions to the developers mailing lists without bothering to check the various developers manuals. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect DEVELOPERS to RTFM. Users are a whole different subject.
Although we rely on it, the release cycle really does screw us from time to time, and in the long drag before Woody finally released, we seriously contemplated a bunch of alternative distributions. The joke emerged at the time - about the two main flavours of Debian, being of course: Debian/Stale and Debian/Broken :)
Morphix is a modular variant of Knoppix. The FAQ explains the differences between Morphix and Knoppix. Simply put, Morphix is much more flexible than Knoppix.
I did an HD-install of the KDE (3.1.1) main-mod. The only problem I had was the with boot configuration (I have an unusual setup), the problem was solved by downloading the boot-disk image that contains the ever-useful Smart Boot Manager (I wish that more distros would, at least, include this as an option).
Minor problem asside, the install went smoothly, it was much, much easier than installing Debian from DVD. You also get much more recent versions of the desktop packages.
Debian, Knoppix, and Morphix are all excellent projects.
1) I do the install and get the hardware working. Even Mandrake can screw up on some hardware, and if you don't even know how to edit text files, you're not going to be able to recover. Most people learn an OS that's pre-installed for them. Why not Linux?
2) They don't have to stress about packaged depends. It's taken care of in a very simple, powerful, and elegant way. I've been using APT for years now, and I still learn something new about cool ways to use it almost weekly.
3) Packages aren't broken "out of the box" as they frequently are in RH or Mandrake. Users can use a subset of the utilities and get used to them rather than searching for which text editor crashes the least.
4) The rules on how packages behave are standardized, and file location/behavior is very predictable. Good for people to learn about good UNIX directory structure use.
5) Things work and configure properly on their own, but you can hand-tune text config files without breaking some bizarre mother configuration script that depends on it being the only thing that ever edits the files.
Once the user gets used to the shell, the directory structure, and basic system management, we talk about the installation process, and they can ususally basically handle it on their own. I learned Linux through the "trial by fire" of installing it wihtout even knowing how to use the text editors. It was painful and it took forever. No matter how pretty a face you put on the installer, you can't get around the fact that OS installs are usually not for beginners. Better to make the system self-consistent and manageable than to allow the user to easily install an OS himself that he has no hope of properly managing for himself.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
I am not trying to fuel a flame here, but I don't really think there are that many "common people" such as plain old managers who know about Linux. IT people are the ones who would be most effective.
Too bad some IT managers view the choce as "Linux = no counterstrike". The network administrator for my Cable ISP really sucks at Counterstrike, but he loves to play it while on the clock.
Many tech support people are worse though. For example, when trying to get my friend's DSL modem to work with Mandrake Linux 8.0, I had to call up tech support. After the guy had me on hold for a while, he comes back on and says "You're trying to get your DSL modem to work with your Lexus, right?"
As far as Linux vs. Windows goes, I believe OpenOffice.org is a great office suite and almost any buisiness can use Linux for all their office administration tasks. If the company wants to focus on their business, not the computer, Linux distros make for good operating systems. If the people in charge of a company favor having fashon makeover software instead of saving hundreds per seat for MS Office and Windows, so be it.
As far as the companies who buy MS products and then lock the computers with Secure PC or Foolproof, management either is very rich and loves the Windows logo, or is probably leading the company downhill.
I usually log in via ssh/xterm and just run a console on the screen. If I run a X server, it's usually Xvnc, so I don't have to work in a noisy machine room.
Desktop/laptop machines are usually RedHat - RH does have a nicer GUI than Debian, but RH seems to be rivalling Microsoft in the amount of unneeded programs that get installed by default.
you forgot to capitalize it, it's supposed to be "The Obviously Superior Linux Distribution Against Which There Can Be No Other Contenders", and as it is a phrase to be used often, TOSLDAWTCBNOC, for short. Yes, the "TCBN" part is tough.
Misleading titles? Inflammatory blurbs? Keep in mind that Slashdot is a tabloid.
You should never, except in very rare cases, have to recompile your own kernel to get hardware working on Debian. The "stock" Debian kernel comes with zillions of modules for everything under the sun, and there are a few *-modules packages containing extras. There are plenty of reasons to recompile a kernel, but getting your network card working isn't one of them.
The biggest problem is finding out what the hell module to install. It's not exactly as simple as seeing "I have X network card, so I'll install the X module." Many network cards are based on other companies' chipsets, and you have to load the right driver for your chipset. So your card with some random brand name on it might internally be based on the Tulip chipset, in which case you need to load the 'tulip' module. This information isn't often very easy to find, especially if you're someone who doesn't even know that network cards are generally based on a few generic chipsets that get licensed and rebranded (which the majority of computer users don't know).
It's even more fun when you try to tell people it should've been intuitive that they need to load the 'emu10k1' module to get their Soundblaster Live! working.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10