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Debian And The Rise of Linux
There's an article in this month's LinMagAu that asks a question about how the rise of Linux will impact Debian and what that could mean. Good article, especially interesting if you have been a fan of Debian.
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"if you have been a fan of Debian"..
Not only "if", but also "been a fan", implying that most people aren't using Debian any more?
*ducks for cover*
By mid 2004 at the latest Linux will be a serious contender on the average desktop. The downfall of Windows won't be imminent (that will take another couple of years at least) but Linux will begin to take a serious chunk of the market. Kids will be doing their homework with it, Moms and Pops will be doing Internet banking and sending email to Aunt Edna with it, secretaries will be drafting letters with it, accountants will be creating spreadsheets with it.
But will Debian be there?
We all know that Debian is technically one of the most advanced operating systems on the planet, but is it ready to ride the coming shockwave of the desktop Linux juggernaught?
And just as importantly, do we want it to?
Yes, I know the argument that says Debian is created for the benefit of the people who do the creating, and that we shouldn't care if anyone outside the core developer group uses it or not.
I think that argument is bunk.
I say we should want Debian to grow with Linux, because if it doesn't, it's doomed. Doomed to be marginalised in an increasingly Linux-aware market, and doomed to be eclipsed technically by development efforts focused on the high profile commercial distros.
This point was really driven home to me last week when on two consecutive days I was asked for instructions on setting up Apt-cacher under Red Hat. The requests came from people who manage networks of Red Hat boxes using Apt-rpm, and naturally they wanted to cache packages to save some bandwidth. Apt-rpm and Apt-cacher were exactly the solution they needed.
So a Debian initiative saved the day for some Red Hat users. Sweet.
But now the most frequently cited technical advantage of Debian is gone, assimilated by the highest profile commercial distro. Now when people are discussing switching to Linux, there is no longer the argument that Debian is worth the pain of the initial install and the lack of general vendor support in order to reap the benefit of the most advanced package management system in the world. Instead, users can just install Red Hat and still get the benefits of Apt.
Is there anything wrong with that? Absolutely not. It's the way things are meant to work in the Open Source world. Good ideas and good software get around, and a fundamental part of the Debian credo is that we don't restrict who can benefit from it, no matter what their application. That's a principle I firmly believe in.
And of course I'm glossing over the situation a bit here: I can imagine Debian developers all around the world jumping up and down and yelling that Debian is much more than a bunch of packages, or a technical specification for how to create them, or a tool to manage them. But I'm deliberately simplifying things because that's the way the average Joe User is going to see it: Oh, Red Hat has Apt now, cool. I'll use that instead of Debian.
Joe User doesn't know (or care) about the obsessive backporting of security patches to the stable release, or about the technical and social infrastructure and numerous supporting apps built up around Dpkg and Apt, or Debian's devotion to the purity of truly Open Source licences. As far as Joe User is concerned Redhat has Apt, and that's all there is to it. They don't know enough to make the finer distinctions.
Without distinguishing features like Apt, the argument for going with Debian is diminished. Sure, there are still arguments to be made, but they are less obvious. Here's an exercise for you: imagine you are standing at the water cooler chatting with workmates, and a non-technical colleague just said they are thinking of trying Linux at home and were going to install Red Hat but they heard Debian is really good, but has a tricky installer. They think they'll just try Red Hat because that's what they've heard of other people using, but are interested in your opinion because you're in computers. You've got exactly 15 seconds to succinctly explain why Debian may be better for them than Red Hat.
And as people in linmagau.org have already found out
these kind of stories should be kept secret from slashdot for your web server's sake.
I think for Linux to grow more, it needs a reference implementation so that developers and users know that something will work for sure.
I think Debian GNU/Linux should be this system for several reasons.
It's non-commercial, meaning SuSe can't complain that the reference system is partial to RedHat or anyone else.
It's conservative, which is very important for reference systems. If you write for Debian 3.0, you know it will be around for awhile. This doesn't mean that RedHat can't extend their distribution to add more recent libraries or programs. It just mean that something written for Debian 3.0 will work in the RedHat system that says it follows 3.0.
Je ne parle pas francais.
I totally agree with the article. How many times have we seen technically superior technology being totally ignored and people going for 'popular' technology. Remember, the PC itself wasn't a technically superior machine. The intel processors weren't the best at the time, but everybody started buying PC's because they all wanted to play Leasure Suit Larry on it (.. and use Wordperfect).
So Debian should be more of a VHS than a Betamax if it wants to stand a chance...
Yuioup
This is a self-fullfilling prophecy, and to change this will take quite a major change from the existing Debian (fairly elitist) culture.
Where Debian will shine is not nessicarily as a mainstream distro itself, but as the basis of systems that are more widely used, such as Xandros and Knoppix. Is this a bad thing?
It does run the risk that Debian-as-distro/brand become marginalised, but all that needs to happen for the Debian project to stay healthy is that Debian-as-underlying-system is widespread.
This said, my Ideal World(tm) is every man and his dog running Deb... ;)
"To any truly impartial person, it would be obvious that I am right."
Debian should release a stable SERVER subsystem, then build a rapidly improving desktop subsystem that remains compatible with the *stable* server subsystem. Kinda like the UnitedLinux idea, which isn't all that bad. People can tolerate when their desktop apps crash every now and again if their server side is rock solid, as we have come to expect from debian Stable. That server subsystem could also be a basis for various Debian derivatives, commercial and non-commercial.
An example release could be "Debian 4.2, based on Debian_base_3.4"
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
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.
... to much people around comming from Windows.
Debian was always about doing "The Right thing", about not only making things work, but make them work like they should work.
But you cannot build a good distribution on software getting worse and worse. Think about more and more software unable to do basic things, because people did not thought about them as they are not feasable with one human before one computer. Because people grew up with windows and do not even know how it could work.
On good example is konqueror and its identification of file type through filename's suffix. Do you have time to tell 300 users of your computers to rename "download.htm" to "bild.gif" to be able to click on it. (Oh, sorry I forgot, you are using your computer alone...)
Even Debian, which was formerly known to be usable by admins, is now working on abolishing its old working menu system to one build up on KDE's
menus. (Instead that someone would finaly get a menu-method for KDE and the old one.)
It's a shame, the old system capable of creating a menu looking the same under all window-managers (except KDE, because the KDE people do not want to integrate) making life for an admin really easy, is dropped for a thing not nearly capable of it.
(No possibility to specify a menu-hirachy. And the proposed format for icons is png. absurd.)
WARNING : THIS IS NOT A FLAMEBAIT. I LOVE DEBIAN, BUT READ ON ...
I started using Linux with SlackWare when it was the only distro available out there. I used to love them tarballs, but then at the time systems still had manageable sizes, so one really could compile everything in a reasonable time.
Then I had the (mis?)fortune of being hired by a certain Caldera spinoff and was forced to use OpenLinux 1.2. That was my first contact with RPM, and that was a painful contact. Part of my work also involved writing and maintaining specfiles for various cross-platform packages. That's when I learned that (1) RPM was better than tarballs because it had dependencies, (2) RPM dependencies are not powerful enough and (3) RPM isn't backward-compatible. In short, RPM is not good but it's better than nothing.
At that company, I also had the misfortune of meeting a Debian fanatic. Note that I say he's a fanatic of Debian, not that Debian made him a fanatic. Having tried Debian long ago myself, when it wasn't ready for prime-time, and having found it complicated and messy at the time, I was conforted in this idea by the truly detestable way this guy was patronizing everybody who didn't use Debian, and was turned off Debian for another 2 years.
Then, several months ago, it was a sunday afternoon, my local computer shop was closed, and I couldn't find my RH CD to reinstall my box. I though : what the hell, I'm no more stupid than the average Debian user and I have nothing to do, let's try the Debian network-install. Well, I went through a little pain (it's not quite totally polished yet), but I've never looked back. dpkg and apt-get are just a godsend, and I too am now a convert today.
Moral of the story : I avoided using Debian for several years entirely due to the advocacy of one (well, several actually) Debian bigot. You can always say that I should have been more intelligent and I should have made my own opinion, but I never had time and the experience you get from other users do count for me.
In conclusion : what's the biggest good that could happen to Debian ? that other distros' package management got better so Debian bigots wouldn't have such an powerful incentive to behave like asses and disgust other people of Debian before they even try it. Or better still, that the Debian bigots start realizing that they won't win anybody to Debian by being patronizing.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
What could possibly be a reason for writing such an amzingly content-free article? Either the author is completely bored out of his mind or its what we call in Russia "black PR", could it be coming from Redhat that he seems to be whoring in the "article"? RedHat has apt now Debian is dead? WTF? Does Redhta also provide over 4K packages in stable testing and unstable forms? Or is it just a measely freshrpms depository that is only useful for upgrading standard packages that come with Redhat? Debian will contunue to be used by people who value Freedom and stability based release schedules over push the latest buggiest crap now preferebly couple with unresonblu upping the version number.
US-UK-Israel: The real Axis of Evil
How is that possible? We already now no-one reads the articles - so how can the site become slashdotted? Maybe people just open the link in a new window and press reload a couple of times?
"Stop failing the Turing test!" -- Dilbert
Why I like Debian:
(1) Serious philosophical principles. The only people to say GNU/Linux with a straight face. People concerned with my liberty above all else.
(2) No Prepackaged Experience. I run Fluxbox, Gnome-Terminal, Mozilla, and Konqueror, and have a proper GTK/KDE library environment. It all works the way I want it.
(3) The system state is transactional. Glitz is antithetical to transactionality. Glitz hides transactions. I like transactions.
(4) No waiting forever to compile stuff pointlessly.
#1 is the crucial element. Liberty is paramount.
And where do you split the base from the rest?
Think some moments about it and you will realize, that there is no such possibility. (If you do not see it, think some more. I'll assure you this algorithm terminates).
And finaly I want a system I can put on all the desktop system's I administer and know it is running. Unstable software (and everything young is unstable) has nothing to do there.
Though I wished there was some better software around. Some people prefer KDE and Gnome and this things are so buggy, the newest buggy version is better than the old buggy version...
debe-ian or debb-ian? TIA
Granted, it's not a GUI wizard, but that wouldn't be difficult to add. Somebody simply needs to write a GUI interpreter for those walkthroughs, which automatically turns multiple choice questions into radio bullet boxes and makes the whole thing look like a Windows Wizard(TM).
Doesn't anybody find the first paragraph of the article a bit optimistic?
By mid 2004 at the latest Linux will be a serious contender on the average desktop.
Whooah! Slow down there, buddy. We have a decent OS going, but it still lacks a few things which won't come easy (fonts, easy configuration, changing resolution, unified base)
Then the author continues,
The downfall of Windows won't be imminent (that will take another couple of years at least)
Now he's predicting that Linux will cause the downfall of Windows in just a couple of years?!
To me, this seems more "interesting" than his assertion that Linux needs a unified installation base, and whatever he may have had to say about Debian (I didn't read the article).
"Smoking helps you lose weight - one lung at a time" -- A. E. Neumann
"By mid 2004 at the latest Linux will be a serious contender on the average desktop. The downfall of Windows won't be imminent (that will take another couple of years at least) but Linux will begin to take a serious chunk of the market. Kids will be doing their homework with it, Moms and Pops will be doing Internet banking and sending email to Aunt Edna with it, secretaries will be drafting letters with it, accountants will be creating spreadsheets with it."
Would you like to bet some money on that?
"But will Debian be there?
We all know that Debian is technically one of the most advanced operating systems on the planet, but is it ready to ride the coming shockwave of the desktop Linux juggernaught?"
The desktop linux juggernaught? Oh, you mean Gnome. Or do you mean KDE? I know, you mean X, everyone's *favorite* GUI.
The linux desktop is an absolute mess. The article's claim that windows will be dead by mid-2006 is ridiculous. MS has too much money, too much monopoly, and too much inovative stuff just around the bend (read: Longhorn will take advantage of the technology MS developped through the complicated research process of using Mac OSX a lot) to keel over that easily. What's the point of an article if its assumptions are super-optimistic trash?
I'm sorry to disapoint you. But if you thing the advantage of Debian is apt-get, then you did not unterstood the packaging system. Do not understand me wrong, apt-get is a nice way to integrate the downloading of packages in the direct way of installing them. But without a properly working dpkg in the background there is not that much fun.
.rpms, which cause so much grief, once you know this problems are by no way necassary.
And apt ist still very young, it still shows much problems and has errors. Though I fear I will not be able to describe them to you, if learned to live with
So the guy wrote about apt, and how it's been adapted to run on other distros, but he didn't at all mention one strength which is unparalleled by any other distro: platform independence. Debian runs on what, ten different architectures (from memory, too lazy to look it up). No other operating system in the world runs on more hardware than Debian. That's extremely sellable to large companies.
I kind of agree with the premise of the article. I am a new Debian user and I just don't think that most people who are not computer geeks (I'm not a computer geek--I'm just hardheaded and will keep trying until I figure something out) will stick with Debian long enough to enjoy it, at least as it is set up now.
Am I glad that I chose Debian for my first Linux distro? Yes. I learned a lot about my computer and a lot about Linux by choosing Debian. Will I stick with Debian? Yes, it does everything that I want it to and more and I like the fact that I learn more about my computer just by using Debian. Would I recommend it to my little brother who is thinking about Linux but is not the type to spend hours trying to figure out what driver will make his sound card work or how to configure X if he set up his monitor wrong and just gets gibberish on the screen? Hmmm, I have to think about that one for a while. Maybe another distro will work better for him.
Well, maybe ports w/ portupgrade?
Tarmo
IHMO I really feel that Debian is aimed at the server and techincal user market and not the sort of people who run windows. Debian is very very powerful but not that intuative. For example to setup networking you have to /etc/network/interfaces. In RH you click on the pretty networking panel.
However as mentioned in that article apt-get is a saviour. Security problem on RH. Download RPM, check deps, install. Fix broken config
Debian: apt-get update && apt-get install
Walk away
Just MHO
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
The company i work for uses a good deal of redhat for workstations and high end servers. Even our NT admin converted to redhat and uses vmware for when he needs to run NT. I personally now run debian at work, and am trying to get them to change to deb.
After using redhat for many months here, then changing to debian, ill never go back to RH. It can be a pain to get installed, but once there, its solid. where as on redhat I had lots of dep issues because I was always installing cutting edge crap. I have done the same on debian, but with alot less issues. With in a few weeks ill have the chance to change over our DNS server to debian. And onward from there...
We have seen that living things are too improbable and too beautifully "designed" to have come into existence by chance.
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 Linux gets a lot bigger, but Debian doesn't get bigger with it-- so what?
The Debian developers seem to be happy to work on Debian for their own use and for the use of the people who use it now. As long as that audience doesn't shrink too much-- and I doubt it will, for though many slashdot posters love to scoff at this, there are some people who use Debian for philosophical and other reasons-- then the same number of people will continue to use Debian.
Yeah, I agree that Debian needs to move forward and needs to make sure it stays as close to the "cutting edge" as possible. But I don't understand why other Linux distributions exploding into extreme popularity among people not currently using Linux at all must detract from Debian. That sort of "must be the market leader to survive" mentality may work for commerical entities (be they open or closed source companies), but Debian isn't one such beast.
Indeed, I suspect what will happen is that the "mainstream" distros will become more attached to proprietary offerings. Red Hat's made amazing contributions to the open source community, but if their users are demanding crossover office sorts of things bundled with Microsoft Office, and M$ agrees to licence that, I'd be surprised if Red Hat didn't go for it. There will be those who will stick with Debian for philosophical reasons-- and so long as there are enough of them to provide a core of Debian maintainers, why not? It doesn't hurt anybody else.
That's the great thing about free software. Anybody who wants to do their own thing can do their own thing, without being beholden to what somebody else is doing, and without requiring anybody else to be beholden to them.
-Rob
whats realy nice about urpmi that I wish would be added to apt is that with urpmi if you download a rpm thats not on the urpmi server you can type urpmi file.rpm and it will try and get the dependacys off the urpmi servers. saves a bit of rpm hell. I havn't used used mandrake in a wile couse for some reason it doesn't like my mb and for some reason wont connect to the net with my network card, I've tried 3 diffrent cards and it will install the drivers but wont connect, same things happen with knoppix and suse, ok im done ranting time for me to goto bed
This seems to work a little faster: http://www.linmagau.org/modules.php?op=modload&nam e=Sections&file=index&req=printpage&artid= 212
The author raises many valid points, but it should be noted that not many Red Hat users could give a stuff about 'apt'.
Red Hat Linux comes with one free basic RHN/up2date licence. For enterprise customers (like us) 'RHN Enterprise' with central package management, server grouping etc. is a fantastic product and superior to using apt.
Obsessing with apt and the (internal) superiority of dpkg is typical of the Debian bigot. Those of us in the real world have more important fish to fry.
Bus error in your favour. Collect 200kB
It looks like user-unfriendly != survivability. User-friendliness was not the reason I switched to linux in the first place. I trashed M$ because I was getting increasingly frustrated by the lack of transparency, the lack of customization options and, most importantly, the lack of understanding of things that I wanted the machine to do and things that I didn't want the machine to do. JoeUser@Work doesn't want make output flying by on his shell (shell, what's a shell?), neither do Wall street brokers need to tweak the number of running processes on their box to get maximum performance. They want things to be clearly understandable and to operate without any hassle, to get the work done. RedHat is for them. For everyone else, Linux stands for having fun learning how an operating system works, tweaking and, of course, bragging about how well configured, stable and updated their own box is. That's what Debian and Gentoo, among other, are for. So they're not user-friendly. So they start you off with a void, depressing shell prompt. So much the better for us. We soak knowledge from learning things the hard way. And doing things the hard way means fun for us. Rather than competition from RedHat, I see Gentoo overtaking Debian. User migration is far more substantial and has far more meaning for the linux community.
Hack your mind out of its sandbox.
APT is a tool, not an idol so quit the crap. Being a very useful tool indeed it should be, has been and will be ported everywhere it is needed. Go ahead, port it to Apple, the users will only benefit from it.
:)
Calling APT the main and only advantage of Debian is plain ignorance.
Debian's strength lies in maturity which results from well-defined development policies, experienced & dedicated developers and large quantities of common sense
Apart from raving over APT for the first 1/3 of it's length, the article is, of course, right. Average Joe cannot tackle Debian.
Still, I wouldn't worry so much. The server market is huge. Debian simply kicks ass there.
If you look around were Debian is used, it will
usually be used where few competent people are running a large amount of systems. (And do not want to cope with unnecessary problems). Decentral organized universities are a good place to find something.
Of course you will not see a community driven efford to make the best thing possible in an environment, where mangers decide what to take.
(They will always use other criterias then the quality of the product...)
Debian is not only the distribution of choice for the technically savvy, it is in most cases the best choice for deployment in Business.
The inevitable rise of GNU/Linux is one thing, Debian's place in the world is another. The two are not connected!
We deploy GNU/Linux and Free Software, every day, in an Enterprise setting. The opinion-du-jour on 'Linux on the Desktop' has almost nothing to do with distribution selection for any particular business. To the extent that Debian sticks to its long tradition of quality, stability, security and attention to detail it will remain right at the top of the shortlist (certainly for us at the very least).
Any increase in GNU/Linux usage is good for the community. Home users will be swayed by what they have always been swayed by - ease of use, getting their stuff done, and eye-candy. Decisions on Distributions used in business will continue to be made using a differenct set of criteria.
Well, ther are other advantages, but these are the ones I remember now. By the way, I've been using APT for Conectiva, and I can tell you it's really not as good as the original (lacks stability, and is slower).
Debian lives by its contributors. If you reckon they're going away, there's a issue. But I certainly don't see that happening at the moment, so what's the problem again?
``Any sufficiently complicated software distribution contains an ad hoc, informally specified bug-ridden implementation of half of Debian GNU/Linux.''
A couple of other people mentioned Knoppix as the wonderful work of Debian, with better usability.
Knoppix has a wonderful hardware detection wizard, a simple script to install to the hard drive, and is also mentioned in the same edition of LinMagAu, surprisingly the writer didn't include a reference to it.
Personally I'm starting to hand friends a copy of Knoppix, if they like it I'll point them to the hdd install script.
Debian is a great base for Knoppix, and once a user becomes competent they can take advantage of the underlying Debian power - but they dont need a geek on hand to get started.
Here is why I am likely to stick to debian in the foreseeable future:
Let me explain this in a bit more detail:
I started using debian roughly 4 years ago, after having tried various other distributions for different amounts of time (admittedly I was a complete clueless newbie then and had only limited abilites to stray too far from the default install).
Since then I have been running exactly the same debian installation.
I have started with stable, then went to testing, then went to unstable. In this time, I've upgraded my cpu and mobo twice, replaced various hardware, and have upgraded my desktop environment through various fairly incompatible KDE versions, and painlessly went through the c++ ABI changes.
And all I've done in all that time is simply 'apt-get upgrade' or 'apt-get dist-upgrade'. Nothing else.
The package quality of debian packages is usually extremely high, and most package maintainers go to great lengths to make complicated upgrade procedures virtually invisible. And it works.
In the mean time, I have seen many of my friends repeatedly re-install their linux system from scratch, because upgrading simply didn't work out quite as expected. And I felt reminded of those good old windows times, where you just re-installed your system every half a year or so.
I don't want that. I want to install my system and keep it up-to-date and want to never have to re-install it (unless the box was compromised of course).
That's why I love debian, because it makes the daily package-juggling and -upgrading easy, and thus improves my quality-of-life-in-front-of-the-box considerably.
I can't say I'm up-to-date with other distributions any more, and I've got nothing against other distributions at all. I am fairly sure the installation procedure of most other distros is far superior to the current debian installer, and probably many have more user-friendly configuration tools as well.
I just watch all my friends doing things I don't want to do. And that makes me a happy debian user.
And for the same reason I would immediately decide for debian when it comes to setting up a linux box at work (partly of course because I know he system better).
Anyway, thanks for reading :-)
I'm sick of this argument: "Average Joe doesn't care... It's too difficult for average Joe... The product has no future... Let's make the product easier for the brain-dead and dumb it down".
For the record, there exist such thing as market niches and they can be lucrative enough. Not everything should be mass-produced. Maybe millions of average Joes do not care about single vendor and forced upgrade risk. Let RH make money servicing them. There will be a limited number of sophisticated and influential users who will always need (and support) Debian.
--
I don't even care to convince windows users to switch to Linux or Apple. After trying in the late 90's where nobody cared (I cannot play my game there? begone!) to the latest years were everyone wants to know how it works. I know that open source also involves helping eachother, but I don't really care about people I tried to convince some years ago, and then want me to help them after they screw up their system.
... It's sad ... luckily there are forums on gentoo, so I can help those who are really in need and them helping me with those features I haven't played with yet.
(yes this can be compared with sex)
More to the point: Debian is already marginalized to a certain extent. In the semiconductor industry, if a simulation or regression tool runs on linux, it runs on RedHat linux. A specific version of RedHat linux.
It is one of the first questions that technical support will ask: what version of linux is the tool running on? And if you answer incorrectly, you get a free trip to the sorry but that is not a supported configuration hang up. I am responsible for about a hundred linux boxes and none of them are Debian, for precisely this reason.
The real question is: so what? If the Debian developers are really as keen as everyone says they are, then it really doesn't matter -- they will keep coming up with technical innovations which will get tried, proven, and then absorbed into "more popular" distributions. Let Debian users be on the cutting edge, while those of us with real work to do can use the distilled and canned solutions to get on with our lives.
you should read everything on the internet as if it had "but I'm probably talking out of my ass" appended to it.
On good example is konqueror and its identification of file type through filename's suffix. Do you have time to tell 300 users of your computers to rename "download.htm" to "bild.gif" to be able to click on it. (Oh, sorry I forgot, you are using your computer alone...)
/etc/magic and take no notice of the file name, would work far better.
This is an example of copying a design flaw from Windows. When doing things the "unix way", use
The parent is lying and reposted a modified version.
Just because Debian is for a niche market doesn't mean it has to die if it doesn't go after the mainstream we-don't-care-how-it-works market. "Turn-key" solutions are not for everyone.
My current favourite magazine has several debian articles including this one updating debian
Unfortunately I cannot find the web link for the July issue workshop article about setting up Debian. I expect they'll make it available in August. They're very enthusiastic, and have included the install files on CD in the July 2003 issue. If I had a spare PC I might try it. Especially as they say you can use it to resurrect a pentium 100 (So I guess my pentium 133 would be ok).
I think Debian will survive as long as the guys who are building it now continue to be interested and new programmers take up the quest for the perfect OS, where perfect is defined more in terms of reliabilty, stablility and security than easy good looks.
What will get the mass market but never the geek market, are cheap (reliable) computers that are more compatible with people. They're still years off true user friendliness in hardware, software and people interfaces. Imagine no pain switching versions, or upgrading. Imagine not needing "training" to learn how to use the latest word processor, or to get the best out of animation software or video editing or being able to play the newest adventure game without having to read 300 pages of the manual, and learn lots of weird keyboard or mouse tricks to control the interface. Imagine computer games that you could play and keep fit at the same time. Hmm, I remember a rowing machine that had a video game of a shark chasing your rowing boat, and you had to row to keep ahead of the shark. That was nearly 10 years ago, but the gym I went to most recently didn't have it. Just numbers. Boring. Imagine having to pedal to keep your aeroplane off the ground in flight simulator?
Hmm got a bit carried away there.
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.
Slackware
The true revolution of Linux is on the desktop, Debian has proved itself on servers, but it will NEVER be a popular distro for the desktop. Gentoo will easily take over Debian for all the obvious reasons. We hail the fact that Linux gives us source code, so why stick with binary distros while we can tailor software for our specific architecture? Joe/Jane User will choose Gentoo for its friendly community, and avoid the trolls of the Debian camp. Any serious Linux users, or even Joe or Jane, can never be satisfied with binary distros. Portage is the way to go, and you know it. Debian is dead and done.
As I said, Linux is slowly drowning in windows users. It's not that there are no better ways around. But that the whole thing is shifting in the wrong direction. (I'm still waiting for the first to ask: "Suffixes are faster. Why are they there, if they are not needed".)
The whole problem is people grew up with those design flaws. They find them natural and think it's the best for newbies. (And don't believe me, that I need the same time to teach an computer illitare person how to use LaTeX like to teach them some WYSWIG-Editor. And be it only the time they need to finaly move the mouse exactly enough for usage of menus. And no, those cryptic LaTeX-commandos are by no way more cryptic then the name and the structure of the menu. Word or Openoffice may be faster to click around till there is something, but looking in a book is surely faster...)
The article claims that since Debian's technical advantages can (and to some extent have been) be "borrowed" by other distributions, and since Joe User doesn't care about the policy advantages of Debian, then Debian is doomed to be marginalized as the Linux market grows with unprecidented numbers of Joe Users. I strongly disagree.
Debian has always had a strong following with Systems Administrators who want a strong, stable, supportable platform for their GNU/Linux based services that can be centrally administered without waisting a lot of time. The same forces will make Debian significant as a corporate desktop. This is a huge market, and while Joe User might be on some of those computers, he's not the one making the decision.
Red Hat wins its share of this market through marketing, Debian wins its share through precisely the same policy superiority that the author discounts. Sure, Joe User doesn't understand the policy advantages, but Joe User doesn't play in this field. Sure, Red Hat and other corporate marketted distros will mean Debian will probably never even get a majority share of this field, as long as there are systems people who are allowed to make systems decisions, Debian will be a player here.
The other two markets are Small/Home Businesses, and Home Users. These are the fields Joe User plays. And no, he's not necessarily likely to gravitate towards Debian (actually, from my experience he is, but all my evidence is anecdotal, and it's irrelevant for my point). What the author misses is a key differentiation distros that borrow from Debian.
Some distros, like the example of Red Hat borrowing apt-rpm/apt-cacher, are alien distros borrowing a tool that was developed by Debian. While they probably will contribute to development of the tool, these don't do much for Debian as a whole.
Other distros are derivative of Debian. They put their own installation and look and feel, do their own marketing and often usability testing. They might not even mention their relation to Debian, but, at their core, they're Debian, and developers developing for these Distros are directly helping Debian development. Some significant distros in this category are: LindowsOS, Progeny and Libranet. They're not Red Hat, but they're growing, and growing strong.
I feel Debian's chances of being marginalized are slim.
----
Open mind, insert foot.
Let me preface this stating I know very little about Debian so please be gentle. I am more a web developer than a sys-admin, though I wear both hats. I don't like babysitting the server I have a few sites running on therefore I chose RH for the RH Network and up2date. I prefer RH 7.3 but recently I got a little worried when I read something here about RH cutting 7.3 off. I tried 8 once and it just wasn't stable. I havn't tried 9 yet but I guess I'm not all that optimistic after my 8 experience.
Anyhow, this got me thinking... would this be a good time to go ahead and switch to a different distro? Of course Debian was first to enter my mind since I read it's praises here all the time. Here's my question, after the initial investment of time into the install how much time should expect to invest in a Debian install? Will apt make it easy for me to keep my server updated with the latest security patches? Are there Debian lists to let me know when there's a security patch I need?
I hope I've explained myself well enough to get some helpful responses. Also, if there's another distro you would recomend let me know.
Ricky Silk
kung foo ezine let me waste your time.
In a capital market, the junk eventually dies. I know this is hard for some people to believe but it's true. Linux is doing well because some of the biggest players screwed their head on straight and started shooting for ease-of-use.
"Technically superior" is a BS rationalization for not getting a product right the first time. The PC might not have been technically superior to other machines of the era bot they had the adaptive edge of being an open infrastructure.
Would you really want to operate in a market where Apple, IBM and maybe Amiga call all the shots on what hardware you can use and what software you can design with?
Linux would never exist in such a market.
Laws are for people with no friends.
I feel a bit weird commenting as a Debian user, 'passing judgement', as it were, on a developer's thoughts. Then again, I was a marketroid in a previous life.
But clearly, he's worried about marketing aspects of the distro. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's misplaced, in my view. Why?
Debian's Social Contract states that they're trying to release an OS for everyone. Part and parcel of that is the idea that a) it costs nothing and b) is free to modify as needed, which in fact is the more important of the two.
It runs on nearly everything, exceeded only by perhaps NetBSD. To do so it balances nicely the needs of server admins with desktop users, by having two baseline reference implementations (yes, I know there are more, but bear with me): stable for servers, testing or unstable for desktops.
It has numerous subprojects that try to cover a bunch of areas the commercial distros don't (at least, not together, anyway): Debian Jr., the Desktop Project, the Multimedia Distribution, PPC, and so on.
It has an open security policy and huge bug database. More packages than I know I'll ever install. Easy-to-use upgrader: and one point the apt-rpm guys don't seem to be aware of is the Policy aspect to Debian -- sure, using apt is usually pretty good, but have you ever tried to install RPMs from another distro on rpmfind.net ? Usually it works, but when it doesn't...
And the political debates on licensing is not just a bunch of wank. I get tired of them just as much as the next person, but developers worrying about them usually means that I don't have to .
========================================
Death will come, and will have your eyes
-- Pavese
I found very funny the messages that start like this. It seems no one dares to complain about Debian, because they've somewhat accepted that it's "superior" (note the quotes; I'm not saying it is, just quoting). Anyway, the "I love Debian, but I use <distro> because <reason>" is quite standard. Usually <reason> has been it's hard to install, and it seems that it's still the number one complaint. I agree to a point with that: it's hard if you know nothing about computers. I wouldn't ask my fashion designer fellow to install Debian only by himself (though, thanks to his friends, he's quite computer savvy now, and he's the "computer expert" in his own department :-)), but I won't ask him to install Mandrake or RH either. If you don't know what a partition is, you won't understand that you need to partition a HDD even if it's said in big, red and blinking letters, with a nice dancing HDD that sings aloud.
But anyway, on to the trolling:
<standard_debian_zealot_rant>As other have said, Debian is not just apt. One of the reasons given, and something that I think most people don't value enough, is the ability to upgrade fully the distribution with 0 downtime. Ever tried to upgrade a rpm-based distro? I did only a few times, so correct me if I'm wrong; but usually it means inserting the CD with the new distro and upgrading. I'm not sure if that means that you have to reboot, but I'd dare to say that you have. And that is what a corporate environment needs? My ass.
There's a trend that I've always seen in Linux, since I started: people start with "flashy" distros (RH, SuSE, Mandrake, etc.), because they're easier to install. As they know more about Linux, they gradually change to Debian. This may be not true anymore; there are always the wanna-try-coolest-distro types that will install anything that is perceived as new and cool; I think that they're mostly into Gentoo now. But it has been true in my experience.
I know people that sysadmin RH boxes, and they usually like Debian once they've worked a bit with it. Debian may be hard to install, but in the long run is the easiest to maintain; and that's not only because of apt, but because it's very well thought off, and not driven just because marketing.
</standard_debian_zealot_rant>C'mon, -1 Redundant or Troll. I've earned it :-)
My weblog in spanish
Debian is dying. One more crippling bombshell hit the already etc etc etc etc....
It's my understanding that Corel Linux was based on Debian. Rumor has it that Microsoft was so afraid that they bought up a bunch of Corel shares and made the company cease and desist. More recent rumor has it that Microsoft has now dumped Corel, not unlike rats leaving a sinking ship. BUT-- Corel still has Name Recognition. Without Microsoft to say them nay, why shouldn't Corel distribute Debian Linux once again?
Hello! Stop complaining and look what the menu system is really turning into at freedesktop.org
and more specifically here:
freedesktop menu spec.
debian/rules
In articles like this much is made of the inevitable decline of Windows desktops in favour of GNU/Linux. Journalists like to predict when Microsoft will die and which distribution will be the new OS star. This however may all be irrelevant to average users, as neither Microsoft nor Open Source Software have yet produced an operating system that the average computer illiterate user considers useable.
Microsoft is driven by its marketing machine to produce more and more features in a relentless treadmill of unecessary upgrades. So providing a horrific mess of options and menus to the user.
Development of Open Source operating systems have been driven by the needs of its developers. While many of the packages are indeed excellent they do not provide an easy to use system for the end user. No one has yet produced a free distribution that the average user would find easy to use. Each desktop has its own quirks and way of doing things.
I belive that the next few years will see GNU/Linux or ****BSD becoming the dominant server operating system. This is something that Debian excels at. The desktop market is up for grabs as Microsoft seem to be faltering. Apple seem to understand the useability angle as their current systems are eminently user friendly. If Apple keep the costs of their hardware down they are well placed to own the desktop market for a while.
Only when a distribution such as Debian tries to produce a distribution with usability as the overiding priority will users switch to GNU/Linux.
In the long term though Open Source Software will inevitably be the only choice for the majority of software worldwide, not just the desktop.
Steve
Things are even worse. When we are talking
about Linux on desktops, we should talk about
home users exclusively. And only about persons
without families.
Desktop computers must die.
In any other environments be it office, or large
family house, just turn off hard drivers and
memory except barely neccessary to run X server
from all computers except one.
With 100Mbit or even gigabit network you can replace
hordes of desktops with X-terminals, which requires almost no maintainance, are dirt cheap
(if you paid more than $100 for X termianl system
block, somebody cheated you), and are completely
replacable. No user grief about loss of data
if one of terminals went out in smoke.
When we are talking about multiuser hosts,
which serves dozens of X-terminals, all advantages
of Debian multiplies
APT is great because it is miantained by thousands of individuals responsible for only a few packages. This narrow band of interest can make sure that they get *their* package right. This is unlike the commercial distros where I imagine 5 or less people manage the dependancies of the whole distro.
Dude, hold on a second.
Debian is not planning to switch to KDE's menu system nor they're planning to dump their menu policy and all the beautiful thoughts behind it. It's just about the format of the menu entries.
Namely they're planning to switch their own, though working and widely used (withing their distribution), menu format to use the same standard as described in freedesktop.org's Desktop Menu Specification. Or at the moment it's still just a proposal, I haven't been following the discussion, so please correct me if I'm wrong.
But anyway, it's the same thing what GNOME and KDE of the future will be using to build their menus. Now is that a bad thing then? GNOME, KDE and Debian sharing the same menu entries but still everyone is able to present those menus as they natively please (as long as they implement the freedesktop.org standard)?
they had the adaptive edge of being an open infrastructure.
Only once Compaq reverse engineered the BIOS to sell PC clones.
If the IBM PC was released today with DCMA & Software patents then the clones would never see the light of day.
Some of us can remember Apricot IBM Compatibles that weren't.
The success of the PC was down to "Runs Lotus 1-2-3" not the ISA bus.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
I feel the same way about apple's disto. =]
All the reasons you just stated is what keeps a Joe User away.. They NEED prepackaged fluff.. they don't care about politics.. they dont even know what compiling is.. They just need to stick in a disk and it 'work'.. and to have someone to call when it doesn't.....
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Users today want to rip, mix and burn if the user questions asked in our office are anything to go by. Apple hardware and software is easy to use from the users perspective, and until GNU/Linux distributions match this they will be used by the average user.
As Microsoft seems to be increasing the level of complexity in their products the users over the next few years are likley to migrate slowly to OSX and GNU/Linux in that order.
Is there any simple (as in Joe User simple, not simple as in run this script, patch this file, compile this kernal simple) way to get WinModem support under Linux?
I always said that the user interface needed to be slicker to get people using it. With Redhat 9 (and Gnome) I think it's there - but the absolute killer for me is that i've wasted far too much time so far farting around with trying to get a WinModem to work.
If Joe User can't dial up to check his hotmail - Linux will be off the PC before you know it.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
you forgot about debian's fierce attentiveness to genuine Free Software,
which the article acutally called "Debian's devotion to the purity of truly Open Source licences."
that aside, debian will soon have support for the "better" free software kernels (bsd and hurd),
which will attract the more technical users when they abandon linux
as too mainstream, monolithic, and bogged down by politics.
i hope debian does some work on OpenBSD or attempts reaching its security reputation.
my current home system is an OpenBSD box and a Debian GNU/Linux box
I look forward to changing it to Debian/OpenBSD and Debian/HURD.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
after the backlash of software patents i the press over the 2003-2007 time span..
Debian will be one of th few pure distro/kernels that doesnt support software patents..
Don't Tread on OpenSource
I'm really interested as to if people involved:
* Manage more than 50 desktop Debian machines
or
* Just wish everyone was running Debian
While both goals are great, I really, really hope the system is not castrated for the benefit of the second goal. Long development cycles, massively stable base software, great administration tools, and well thought out ancillairy tools all make Debian work. Having a good massive-installer is nice, but I've been taking care of that problem myself in a farily small amount of time over the past year by modifying the autoinstall package. Because of this, we can install most modern machines within an hour, and do *no* manual configuration aside from (a bug at the moment) display resolution.
I figure, if a user really needs something easy, I hand them Mandrake. I'm not going to see Debian machines going away because people are also using Mandrake. It takes a massive amount of system design to make it easy-for-self-administration compared to just a 'really good system'.
-- dieman - Scott Dier
I'm not linux bashing but it is a truth that there will eventually be a paradigm shift.
:
If the shift from Windows to Linux succeeds then you'd better have one eye open for what will replace Linux and that will be upon you sooner if what you want from Linux is Windows without the cost.
As Dennis Ritchie said
unix retarded o/s development by 10 years
linux retarded o/s development by 20 years
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
A can remember a fairly simialar thread on Slashdot a few years ago. Back then there was a strong "GUI is for weenies" mentality and it was the Slackware fans that were the true hardcore Linux crowd (whatever happened to Slackware?).
My position back then was that, "If you want Linux to compete with Windows on the desktop, then it has to be as easy to use as windows, if you don't want it to be within the abilities of the average user, then you will never compete with windows". Well, *that* commentary caused some backlash.
Linux (or GNU/Linux if you must), is a good system regardless of whether it competes with Windows on the desktop or not - it's certainly doing well in the server market. However, what I said back then is just as true today. For Linux to compete on the desktop, "average Joe user" must be able to pop in a CD and have the installation auto-detect everything he needs and generally "take him by his little pink hand" and walk him through everything he needs to do. The average user just wants it to work, he has neither the time nor the inclination to fiddle with it. He's not lazy, he's just not that "hard-core" about computers. Additionally, he needs Quicken (or an equivalent), he needs TurboTax (or an eq.), he needs AutoCad, he wants to play games (GameSpy for Linux?), etc.. If he can't get what he wants/needs, then he'll stay with Windows regardless of whether or not he feels Linux is a superior system.
Today, Linux enjoys a growing market share. It may well compete with or even replace Windows on the desktop and I hope it does. If it is desired to get there from here, then Linux must compete with Windows in it's own areana.
A goal is a dream with a deadline
I was trying to make a usable machine out of a Pentium-266Mhz (2G HD) donation. It came with w95 and ie3.0 (in japanese!) My sister had just moved to Japan and desperately needed to be able to email parents and boyfriend. After giving up on finding a legal copty of w98 (in English) I thought hell. Let me try linux - can't be any worse. After downloading and attempting to install RH, Peanut (don't ask) and SuSE I finally found Debian was the only distro I could figure out how to make fit on such a small system. Something about the mantra stability-stability-stability made it seem like the solution for putting on a pc thatn I couldn't check on regularly but needed to be dependable. In six months I have yet to regret my choice.
To me, Debian is simple and elegant. I don't use Linux for a desktop system at all anymore, I use OS X and Windows. Why do I use OS X? Because it's simple and elegant. Windows isn't exactly that, but it's a lot more so than your average Linux desktop. (I'm talking Win2K, not XP here.)
I do, however, use Debian on a couple of servers. I used to use RedHat because you could pretty much install it and use it, but when I needed to modify something - like add a new module to Apache - it would all turn to shit. Eventually I tried out Debian because I'd heard ravings about apt. There was no going back.
After I purchased an iBook I came to appreciate form and functionality more than the intricacies of how things work. Sure, it's not as powerful as my friends Toshiba, but it does the job whilst being smaller, quieter, lighter and longer-lasting on a battery charge than his. I'm sick to death of fucking with drivers in Windows, etc. I just want things to work, and to work simply so I can get on with being productive. Microsoft try to do it, but it just doesn't work. (Look at XP or MSN Messenger 6 - meant to look simple and nice, but horribly cluttered and confusing.) Apple know how to do it. Same with Debian.
I see Debain being to Linux distributions as Apple is to PC's and Ferrari is to cars - a small, niche player, producing quality products for those who appreciate the finer things in life.
I can't even get gnome to work properly with my new intel motherboard with the sound and graphics all combined and sharing memory. Naturally intel doesn't want to admit that anyone would run anything but windoze on their system. Bleck. And I had trouble persuading the machine to cough up its personal details even with win installed (as well as Freebsd). Freebsd is quite happy, it's just the GUI layers that won't speak to me.
I would love a "default" install that just runs, offers me choices that are available instead of expecting me to know how the intel board understands itself (when intel won't tell me either). Then I'd like to be able to go back and tweak things later.
Knoppix: IQ test1: Find a page in english
Knoppix: IQ test2 (tech knowlege): Figure out how to fix the frame representation so that the page is not at 110% (ie no matter how much screen your browser takes up, you still have to scroll to see the last couple of words of every line).
And that's just their web page. Not very encouraging. I don't think either group (Knoppix or Debian) are very focussed on non-geeks. Perhaps if they imagined that undirected computers were going to use their operating system. Ie build an interface a moron could use.
Missing FAQ:
What's the difference between Knoppix KDE and Gnome?
How do I know I'm getting an english language gui install cd image (and not german)?
refs
google Knoppix
First result German
second result page overwidth
at last, just right, sort of
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.
I tried out Debian 3.0 recently and basically came to the same conclusion as the author: Debian really needs to advance in usability.
I'm a fairly technical user that has used Linux in some form since 1998, so I'm not exactly a newbie. I wanted to use Debian since it was truly free and I heard a lot of good things about apt.
The actual experience, however, was very unpleasant. I had to run through the installer twice to get a system that could run X. And then managing apt packages and locations was kind of a pain... pointing it to a valid KDE location because I wanted the very latest stable, trying to find multimedia apps for DVDs, etc. I found it very easy to screw up an apt-based system when trying to learn it. I wanted to keep some stable Debian packages while using some unstable packages , which meant all kinds of acrobatics to keep apt from being confused. Compiling your own software meant creating apt placeholders to avoid corrupting your build.... moving the kernel source to a 'standard' location could mean that apt loses track of it. Not to mention that dselect is a real pain to use; I was always selecting the wrong packages or downloading things I didn't want. Synaptic was an improvement, but not a huge one. It has been awhile, but I don't recall having as many problems learning rpm (granted, rpm can be susceptible to the same problems, I guess I'm mostly talking about what comes with the distro out-of-the-box).
In the end, I went back to Windows for a while since I really didn't have to time to be bothered with getting Debian running the way I wanted it. I then downloaded Red Hat 9 (via BitTorrent, I don't recall seeing a Debian torrent anywhere) and got font anti-aliasing, multimedia apps that worked, MP3 support once I downloaded the appropriate RPMs, an X-Windows and KDE install that would allow graphical apps running as root to display without any thought... in short, a desktop system I could pretty much use without thinking about it too much. I even upgraded to KDE 3.1.2 without any pain. And if I decide someday to try apt again, I can get it.
I agree with another post that if I was setting up a server, I probably would think about Debian again, but for a system I can use as a desktop, I would pick Mandrake or Red Hat any day. I can compile my own kernel and install GATOS drivers, etc... but just because I can doesn't mean that I always feel like it.
======
In X-Windows the client serves YOU!
Recently, my RedHat machine got hacked (I left my machine on with about 300 services I wasn't using and hadn't applied security patches in about 40 years and the machine was a DMZ host to my firewall... damn those Romainians with RootKit ;) ) so I decided to download RedHat 9 for my immenent reinstall. But after about an hour of trying to find a download site that wasn't swamped, I talked to a colleage who uses Debian and he convinced me to try it. I downloaded 4 floppy disk images and installed the other packages from the Internet using dselect. It was a painless install and I am very happy with it. I didn't have to install a single thing that I didn't need.
All this to say, even if Debian keeps the install that it has now, I'll still be using it for years to come. Its economy of size is a greater benefit to me than ease of install (though I had no problems installing it).
Another major benefit that it has is that you don't need a CD drive at all. A lot of people use old hardware to run Linux, old hardware that might have had the CD drive removed for a newer machine. With Debian, it is no problem. Even with RedHat, after you get the OS installed you usually end up downloading either the binaries or source for the new programs you want to install.
Honk if you're horny.
See, here's another person who thinks stable and unstable are your only Debian choices. See also the earlier posts about stable servers vs less stable desktops. Nobody knows about the Debian testing distribution unless they hear about it from somebody else. Rather than write a long essay about how everybody needs to market Debian better, volunteer time to change Debian's web site to make the testing distribution more prominent. Then watch Debian's reputation change. The Debian testing distribution rocks.
I've got freebsd running on the P133 which is my gateway (internet not cows) PC. We had to do quite a bit of trickery to get the bios to accept a new 80 gig hard drive instead of the 2 gig one it had. It seemed unprepared to recognise anything bigger than 8 gig. And win98 didn't want to know about anything bigger than 32 gig (I did find a new fdisk to fix that).
Still it absolutely refused to dual boot from the 80 gig drive. Perhaps because we decided on a 10 gig boot partition, that the bios didn't recognise (oops).
So now I can't dual boot. Which is sad because the scsi card that works my flatbed scanner only fits in the slots in the old P133. And I can't get it to work with freebsd So I'm going to have to try again, or use something else for my gateway.
I was able to dual boot on the 2gig drive but I ran out of room for the freebsd. Imagine no ports and no upgrades, and no more development because nothing fits on now.
And strangely an 8 gig drive would cost me $80 (OZ) while the 80 gig drive cost $120. And similar extreme prices for memory for obsolete systems. Maybe I could fund a new pc and scanner by wrecking (breaking up for spares) the old one?
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.
And the proposed format for icons is png. absurd.
while i dont know enough about debian or kde to comment on the rest of this post (i dont use kde more than i have to, and have only used debian on servers), why is png such an absurd format for icons? i personally can't think of a better one...
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
Has this guy ever visited the land of Clue? "... is it ready to ride the coming shockwave of the desktop Linux juggernaught?" I like debian because it is debian. It has apt, debs, a great userbase that answers questions, it is entirely free as in beer and speech, and it doesn't need to be reinstalled. However, I don't think of it as a desktop distro like mandrake of lindows. What "juggernaut" is there? What percentage of desktop machines use linux as a desktop OS vs. server boxen and production boxen? I don't think the fledging user base can be described as a juggernaut anywhere outside of a comic book. I love linux and gnu tools, but please don't oversell something as it knocks your credibility with me.
a slut did tulsa
> On good example is konqueror and its
> identification of file type through filename's > suffix.
All this example shows is that you don't know what you're talking about. Konqueror uses magic based system with the extensiong only being used if no other information is available.
Rich.
and here's why:
I am a relative newbie to Linux. Part of the reason I am even looking at it is the continually unstable nature of Windows. (Do NOT flame me; do NOT tell me how stable W2K and XP are; just take this statement at face value right now, I use windows daily and have used Windows daily since 3.0 and I think I am entitled to this opinion). Since making the decision to at least look at Linux, I've been thru quite a number of the most recommended distros. I have 5 different machines at home so I am in a somewhat unique position to look at compatibility issues.
Not one distro was trouble-free, not one distro was what I would call stable. Software included with the distros would NOT install or would install and later corrupt itself so much that it quit working; hardware detection was very much hit and miss on sound cards, video cards and NICs among the 5 machines, the list goes on and on.
With lots of patience, I went thru Lycoris, SuSE, Mandrake, the last version of Corel Linux they published AND Red Hat. The votes aren't all in on Red Hat yet, but every other distro was unusable in my environment!
And then, due to a thread here on slashdot, I tried Cluster Knoppix. This CD booted on evry machine at my house perfectly. It recognized evry piece of hardware, including a wireless NIC that I had given up on running under Linux, worked flawlessly with my router connected to my DSL line, in short everything that the other distros choked on was absolutely NO PROBLEM with Knoppix.
I did some research at the Knoppix site, discovered that it was based on Debian and I am quickly coming up to speed on installing and maintaining Debian. Yeah, it's a little more difficult, but if I can get the stability and fcuntionality out of it that I have seen on the Knoppix CD (everything just works!) than it will be worth it.
Now this is just my opinion and it isn't totally informed yet, but I think many of the most popular distros out there are suffering from the same thing MicroSoft did; rampant featuritis! They are all so eager to put the latest, greatest, UNSTABLE software and features into their distro and rush it out the door with inadequate testing that their end result is unstable. Debian, at least in the blurbs that I have read about it on the Web, is taking a much more conservative approach to this.
And it seems to have paid off, at least in my limited initial experience with it. Before Debian or Debian advocates heed this article's clarion call to arms and start adopting the upgrade and patch cycle that seems to be the norm nowadays, I would think real long and hard about it.
At the risk of sounding like flamebait, what's wrong with PNG? It's miles better than GIF in both quality and file size, and seems ideally suited to small images. Not to mention that it's completely open. Sounds good to me.
I'm all for diversity, but to me the problem with Linux (and no flames, I use linux every day) is that each distro has a few good features, but none really nails it. I love slackware's simplicity, and have become accustomed to it's install, but I suppose a more user-friendly install would be nice. Debian, as you say, has some great features but suffers the same problems as slackware. Redhat and mandrake are very user friendly but do things in nonstandard ways sometimes, making it a pain to figure out why they do what they do. You get the idea.
It ultimately would be great for some distro to piece together all these features into something that has ease of use but allows great control as well. And since there are different definitions of what is great, there will still be different distros. Being a chemist, I would love to see a distro with more "science-y" tools. But what we need to see go away are needlessly clunky installs and some of the clearly inferior tools.
Sometimes, this arises from the same "reinvent the wheel syndorme" that plagues the linux office suite problem - why does KDE need to make a bad office suite while making a decent OE? Similarly, why write a bad package manager when a good one exists? What's surprising is that since this is open source, I would expect more "borrowing" than currently occurs since it's perfectly legal.
Bottom line is, I don't really care if Debian goes the way of the dodo, so long as the cool stuff that Debian gave to the OSS community stays with us.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Go to debian.org, and look at documentation. For example, their CONFIGURATION-HOWTO was last updated in November 2001.
Debians community is the most support-unfriendly to a new user that I have ever encountered. On the other side of things, I tried g***** (that seems to be a dirty word around here) last fall, used their frequently updated install docs with no problems, posted on their *very* friendly forums/mailing lists/irc, etc and my room has not seen a windows box since.
Debian is not out to reach the "Joe Desktop Blow" market now, and it will not be in 2004. It's a very server oriented version of a nice server OS type.
FUD.
Unable to read configuration file '/bigassraid/htdig//conf/14229.conf'
Geocrawler error message.
Personally I would like to see one or two really great Linux distributions become the defacto standard by which all other distributions are compared. As opposed to having dozens of really crappy inconsequential ones like now.
What's this 'if I have been' stuff you're talking about?
And, btw, Debian in fact is *growing* in users due to the first people recongizing that SuSE, RH and Co. only can make money from homeusers by changing their distro 3 times a year and asking for a pricey update in order to get the newest XFree and stuff.
The last SuSE I got was 7.2 Pro and that was my third. Now I'm fed up and will go vendor independent. So do *many* others. Gues why the deb mailinglist is by now almost just as frequented as the suse ml.
Bottom Line:
This article comes damn close to serious bullshitting territory.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I thought this looked familiar:
Exhibit A
I don't want to bother...http://www.debian.org/releases/
Not to mention support for a full alpha channel, which is all but a requirement for decent icons these days...
While I do not know for 100% certain, I'd guess that'd be because .png is a compressed format and has a tons of unnecessary stuff for icons (such as embedded data). Icons are tiny and don't need embedded data. For them most important thing is access speed for maximizing the responsiveness of the GUI.
But hey, what do I know, IANAOSP (Operating System Programmer).
While Red Hat is at it with rpm and apt-get, they should build the equivalent cygwin system. That is the way to start invading windows desktops. Get people hooked on free software and then show them the better and free OS that runs the applications natively.
I looked at it, and I did not know if I should cry or be angry.
As I said, its a nice idea to make KDE-entries usable for Gnome. For anything else it is completely unusable. It's just like KDE is always:
"I know Windows, Windows is good. A window manager which has no support for png's in it has no right to live and cannot be better for anyone than KDE.
Identifing files by magic is not the Windows-way.
A menu beeing different in any window-manager is consistent, can't you see this".
As I said. I don't know if I shall cry or be angry about so much stupidity...
Look back at what you wrote. I'm not trying to egg you on. Really. If your shop is using RedHat and they're happy with it, why not stay with it? Your single argument to switch to Debian was because you ran into dependency issues as a result of installing cutting edge crap. No work place is going to allow hap-hazard cutting edge crap installation on their machines for very long. Administration would turn into a nightmare, no matter WHAT distro you're using.
Had you said I'd go with Debian because of apt... it would make administering the machines so much easier, I'd have taken your post more seriously.
If it was only to make Gnome and KDE some menus available, there was no need to change. Just write a menu-method for creating the data in the suitable format as it is already done for anything able to show menus except KDE.
It's al about using menu items for KDE-programs natively. This itself implies abolishment of the menu policy. It is also planned to be implemented in a way, that a consistent menu will be much harder (or impossible) to implement.
(As anyone who never cared for a larger heterogenous environment will be able to tell you:
"KDE-menu has to look like a KDE menu. If it looks the same like a fvwm-menu, this is no good to people".)
I think the idea is, if one Linux is going to make it to the desktop of Joe Blow, wouldn't it be great if it were Debian? And if you think (like I do) that it *would* be great, what needs to change to make that happen?
The usability problem is really big. I still kick myself that I didn't use debian for as long as I didn't. Now, for example, I deeply regret installing other distros at work which I considered at the time easier to keep current. But there was a big obstacle -- the installer and the apt system were completely opaque to me.
Seems to me an airtight installer and a simple apt frontend (graphical, sorry) can't be *that* hard. For all I know there could be projects in existence that are well on their way. And aside from the usability, I think debian will be OK marektingwise. Quality gets talked about, especially suddenly easily accessible quality.
A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg. -- Samuel Butler
Because every window-manager being able to show icons supports .xpm's. They were always used for this. And many window-managers in widespread use
(you do not want to tell me a menu-system should no longer support fvwm, do you?) does not support anything else.
Of course any window manager under the sun could be patched and linked to the fitting libraries. But why should they? So that they loose part of their fastness they make them so superior?
I was given a Debian CD when I started on a trip during a summer. I got home and popped the cd into the drive of my pentium 75 and watched as it told me to jump through gads of hoops just so I could be scared away by the "you might lose everything on this computer" bit. Btw, I think that was slink. Yes, I didn't feel like backing up...anyway, fast forward to freshman year of college, I'm in a tech school and a friend shows me his super awesome looking RH setup and I drool until he gives me his RH CD. I set up red hat (seawolf I think) and it's all easy and I get my video drivers set up and am super happy because I'm running linux and it looks cool and I can run back to win2k if I need to play games. My friend with the red hat cds tells me he's using debian now because it's even more awesome and red hat kind of starts to suck, but I keep going with rh because it's working fine for me. Eventually my system begins to bog and I go to rpm -e something and it never works and I'm kind of getting sick of all these dependencies not lining up so I say screw it and wipe the hd again and install debian FF- now I've been running debian for years with no dependency issues, no reinstalls, no real crashes...and I know what my computer's made out of as a Special Added Bonus. point? Other distros are great to get people interested but many fall short and that's where Debian picks up the slack (pardon the pun...no slight intended on slackware people)
I find it interesting that no one has mentioned a principal advantage of Debian at this point: it's free as in beer.
Yes, it is possible to install and maintain e.g. RedHat without paying $25-$100 every so often for their latest boxed set, but a look at the RH corporate bottom line suggests that it's not easy. When I administrated a number of RH systems at work, I used to buy a box regularly: the "big-bang" upgrades make this more or less compulsory, at least as long as downloading and burning cd-sized ISOs is still a pain.
Debian is the only major Linux distro I'm aware of that literally won't take your money for product. (Donations, of course, are gratefully accepted.) Further, apt-based continuous update means that you need never do a "big-bang" upgrade, so there's no hassle with ISOs.
Even Knoppix is free (which is amazing), and this is currently far and away the easiest way to install Deb: I'll put it up against the best commercial installers anytime.
So that's what I'd tell my water-cooler buddy in the article: "Save yourself $50/year, install Knoppix."
I dunno, I would think it is harder to get RH working with apt, than to just install debian...
Cats: All your base are belong to us.
Captain: Take off every sig !!
umm I dont see anything hard about the debian installer... I first installed it right when I started using linux. The hardest part I think is the partitioning, but every distro has to do that. Gentoo is much harder to install than debian.
Cats: All your base are belong to us.
Captain: Take off every sig !!
When you've got the fastest growing desktop OS built on your Linux distribution, you're in no danger of becoming irrelevant. Lindows (if marketed properly, and I believe is has been/will be), has the potential to become the second largest graphical OS, beating the Mac. I believe that Lindows will soon be free, because they're clearly moving towards using Click n Run subscriptions for revenue. That's good for all of us, because Debian is already one of the easiest distrbutions to download and add programs to.
Now I say spend the twenty dollars for supported hardware. If you can pay your utility bill this should not be a problem.
(Disclaimer: I run Debian stable at work, and Debian unstable at home.)
No kidding. Fire up your IRC client, connect to one of the Freenode servers, and join #debian. This is, in theory, a user support channel. In reality, the channel is run along the lines of, "if you have to ask a question, any question at all, you're a luser and deserve every flame we can give you." And they're proud of it; just ask mwilson.
I used to try and answer questions on there, but the flames drown out the conversations too quickly. Basically, "The biggest thing holding Debian back isn't Debian, it's #debian." (i.e., the attitude, not the channel itself)
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
I can't find any additional information on the website, but I thought that XandrOS [ www.xandros.com ] was the successor to Corel Linux?
From the article:
"We all know that Debian is technically one of the most advanced operating systems on the planet, but is it ready to ride the coming shockwave of the desktop Linux juggernaught?"
Juggernaut? I had to look that up (and correct the spelling in the process). Nothing about the word implies SPEED, so in that sense the Linux juggernaut is a reality. It will move so slowly though that many don't notice it coming. Industry pundits are for the most part still pronouncing Windows and Microsoft as invincible.
I think either Windows or Microsoft will transmogrify into something else as the irresistible goo that is Open Source begins to overwhelm it. I don't know what that something else will be, but they for sure won't just sit there and do nothing. They will try to "embrace and extend" but this time they won't be able to get their arms around the foe and will instead BECOME an extension. I think there will be multiple distributions for a long long time, and ultimately, that which is Windows will become just another distro, lost in a crowd.
Debian will become more like Knoppix, one way or another. All the other distros will get better device detection too and better dependency resolution. Why wouldn't they? Why shouldn't they? If you a part of the Open Source movement, you had better not be the type to form emotional attachments to old ways of doing things. You'll die of a broken heart.
Open source allows progress to flow around obstacles, whether the obstacle is a mediocre software company or a pack-rat hacker who longs for the good old days. That is it's beauty, and what makes it unstoppable.
Especially with all the different distros that use it as a base, Knoppix for one, but there have been Corel, Progeny, and Xandros to name a few, ( do not place me on the jihad list for not mentioning your fav deb/based distro); it can't help but survive, I mean if Slackware can keep going... why not?
8^P
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
- testing/unstable *does* have fresh software, and reasonably free of bugs. It has KDE 3.1.2 for instance. (and apt-get can keep testing and unstable straight)
;) ]
- It works the same way on many, many platforms. I can run the same Linux on my iBook and my x86 boxes, and I only have to remember one way of doing things.
- It has a leaner core installation, which makes it good for setting up firewalls and/or on small hard drives.
- It runs well on old hardware. I'm working on a P133-eleron (no L2 cache) notebook for a friend and it *needs* XFree 3.3.6 to work, and Debian still has that. Heck, I even got KDE running somewhat decently on it. (having 72MB helps)
- Very hackable. Look at Knoppix, which is itself very hackable. My main home 'puter runs Knoppix on a 1GB CF card with an IDE adapter. (It's a tweaked version, but the regular version works on CF too!)
[it's ironic that Knoppix, arguably the easiest type of Linux to get running, is based on Debian which has one of the more complex installers
Basically, it's what works for me.
You are the one with the misconceptions.
You must be too young to have read The Purple Book . The entire IBM-PC is defined there, there's even a schematic for the power supply, and an assembler listing of the BIOS source code. NONE of it needed to be reverse-engineered.
A big question in the early days of the PC was: "Well, just how _closely_ is IBM gonna permit people to build to this spec?"
It turned out that IBM made no attempt to protect _any_part_ of what came to be known as the "ISA" other than their ROM BIOS. When Compaq copied _that_, they sued. Compaq hastily contracted with Phoenix Software to come up with a non-infringing 'clean-room' BIOS, which facilitated a settlement, about the same month that they would have been crushed without it. With it, they were able to continue down the road to becoming the dominant suplier of electrical clones.
With the legal question of "Just exactly _how_ 'open' is this machine?" answered, the clone floodgates were opened.
The rest of your statement is about as befuddled. The reason 32-bit protected mode OSsen took a while to come around was because 32-bit protected mode hardware wasn't available until the 80386 was released.
Exceeding the recommended torque is not recommended.
Compare Debian stable to Red Hat AS 2.1. Debian's slow release cycle gives sysadmins a platform they can build on and a very secure and stable server. Has anyone even tried to get Red Hat security updates lately????? Red Hat now makes you fill out a survey to continue getting security updates and the public(free) releases are only supported for 1 year. If you want a pretty desktop use Gentoo or Knoppix. If the Debian installer is too hard don't use it use what ever you are capable of installing. If you can't manually setup X what happens when your gui screws up your XF86Config file?? Reinstall??? Learn Linux don't just use Linux, you will be much happier.
debian on the server. or a beowulf cluster.
redhat on the desktop.
1) When Debian says "Stable" they MEAN IT, the long release cycles of the stable distribution would benefit the enterprise that needs stable, secure, non-changing software.
2) http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ Does any other Distro have one of these?
3) The sheer number of prepackaged pieces of software.
4) The ability to run a totally Free Software OS.
We're all dyin', man. You don't need to be a Kreskin
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.<p>
The World Factbook states that the death rate in China is 6.777 deaths per 1000 population per year. There are 1,284,303,705 people in China, ergo 8703726 people died in China alone last year. How many deaths in the entire world are there? Well lets see. China is approximately 1/6 of the population of earth. Therefore, there are 52,222,357 dead people each year. This means that by the year 2125, there will be 6.3 BILLION dead people.<p>
All major surveys show that people are dying. Death is one of the most popular fears of people. If anything survives it will be surely among transhumanist dabblers, hobbyists, and dilettantes. Nothing short of a miracle could prevent this.<p>
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- Hanlon's Razor
15, Knoppix 14, Knoppix! 13, KNOPPIX!
Mandrake
Ya know, it really doesn't matter how clever you are if the other guy can do a more or less hands-free install and be up and running fast. So what if he isn't a linux uberg33k--if he gets his product to market quicker than you do, isn't your cleverness wasted? I'd rather have a tool that just works than a tool that required me to be clever to figure out how to optimize it.
At the risk of sounding like flamebait, what's wrong with PNG?
The Debian menu system currently supports ALL window managers (at least, all those that can provide menus). But not all window managers support PNG. (See related articles on "bloat" and "kitchen sinks.") In fact, the only format they all support is the native X format: xpm.
Yes, xpms are large, but we're talking about icons for the menu here. Little pictures that appear next to the text, and should be about the same size as a single character!
i _completely_ agree. Knoppix is my first intro to Debian. Since, I'm replacing all of my other distros with Debian, all using the Knoppix cd as an installer.
./configure script asks for them, though I've never had to use it (this hints that a tool could be created that incorporates mirrors of tarballs and gives the user the option of using the brand spanking new version of an app if there is no recent package - yes I know Gentoo does something similar to this already, but it's a time consuming process to compile EVERY package!)
I read comments here suggesting that Debian's packages are old - Knoppix comes with KDE 3.2 and new versions of everything else.
Most of the packages I've installed are the newest versions of the packages. I almost always use -t unstable with apt and have _never_ had a problem. In some rare cases, I grab the tarball and compile - which is MUCH easier in Debian, because if I need any dev packages they are just a command away...there is even a tool in the apt set that installs packages as needed when a
I've spent DAYS installing software for Mandrake, for example (and NO, urpmi isn't apt - not by a longshot).
Finally, while Debian doesn't come with many of it's own tools to configure things, Knoppix supplies a few and KDE and othe thirdparty, if you will, folks do as well. netcardconfig is one example of a knoppix config script (that uses a gui, if you are in X) that is simple to use and makes one avoid editing network conf files).
Much of the system can be configured with KDE. The KDE control applet is about as robust as Linuxconf back in my RH days was...everything from configuring X, to managing users, etc.
Debian doesn't have a samba browser and mounter, like mandrake, but, who cares?? K does, and LinuxNeighborhood is great and comes with Knoppix...
From my point of view, I've never used an OS that works and comes with as much software out of the box than Knoppix/Debian/GNU Linux - and that includes Windows.
Sure - I'll take this challenge on... I use Debian because I can upgrade it - EASILY.
I have a redhat 6.0 machine. Its the "server" version and I paid over $200 bux for the distro - to make my life easy.
Practically every deamon in that release was broken. I ended up replacing almost every deamon they had, including installing the newest release of apache and mod-ssl - so my $200 bux was basically wasted.
Last Xmas I was at the point of an upgrade. I KNOW that if I tackle an upgrade on that old redhat box that it will break all over the place and I shall lose the services it can provide.
My solution? I bought a new machine and installed Debian via the net. It is just WONDERFUL.
So, for the desktop its DEBIAN all the way! Ya! For the servers... OpenBSD. I like my servers to be lean mean serving machines and not bloated the way desktops tend (need?) to be.
But - there are still issues with Debian (woody). It is still not the desk top machine my daughter for instance needs. Neither is Mandrake 8.1 She wants the video and multimedia plugins and these do not seem to install smoothly.
So at this point she is leaning to (ugghh!) XP. Perhaps some people who read this will be interested in working with me (us) in order to improve the debian desktop environment so that she will be happy... eh?
Her needs are minimal - mine arn't. But then I don't need plugins much. Besides my attitude is that if the website for instance won't run in any old browser then I don't visit. Their loss.
I have been using Debian for 6 yrs. It is a great distro, but it is not for user Joe, at least not just yet. Other distro like RH targets for profits, so satisty user joe's needs is the priority. The needs include hardware detection, good looking GUI application/admin, etc. On the other hand, Debian is not for profits but for ppl who usually enjoy hacking of some form. So Debian will last. Debian likes to do all things the duct-taped way using shell script, Perl, Python, etc. Of course, there is nothing wrong with it. But then it exposes a lot of underlying system user joe doesn't really care. For a hacker, that's where the power lies. The solution for user joe is either to use RH and other distro or to wait for KDE/GNOME to have a more organized/functional control panel of some sort. Aside from that, can all distro stops putting every binaries in /usr/bin? Use some directories to organize things better
Everyone wants to talk about usability. What if they're wrong? What if this notion of design through usability testing hits a brick wall sometime in the future? I want Debian to be there to say "I told you so." Because if they aren't, nobody will be.
-Graham
I scanned down the list to read other peoples experiences with Debian, as they were more interesting to me than the statement, that old saw, "The King is Dead, long live the King!". The average user experience says everything about Debian, and overwhelmingly people say the same thing, "Using Debian has caused me issues, no more or less than other Linux variants, but I feel its worth it because of xyz (usually related to some perceived stability perception)". I have been using Debian for three years now, as a result of a friend installing it for me when I wanted to install Linux. I had tried a slackware installation in the early 90's but it didn't work well compared to what I was used to. Baring in mind my background (I started of as a DG Unix admin, in a time when SCO was the PC Unix distribution, and slackware was just a medium for distributing shareware). I have found the experience somewhat enlightening, and yet unduly frustrating also. I have around 14 years of experience with PC architecture, and have spent the last 10 years as a DBA and sysop of most of the major UNICES and RDBM's, yet Linux has proved to be a pain in the butt to get even the most minor of things working for me. And I'm a geek, with decent experience with Unix and PC's that most people simply don't have, even in the PC world. Yet my latest attempt to install debian on an old Compaq, with updated kernel, and dual nics, as a gateway with shorewall, has taken me over two months of dicking with it every other evening for an hour or two, WHAT CHANCE DOES THE AVERAGE JOE HAVE??? I only wanted my own firewall for my ADSL line. Now I appreciate that I'm doing some unusual non-standard things with my installation that most users wouldn't care about, BUT I'M NOT A USER! If I, with two kids, mortgage and other hassles of early 30's life, don't have the time to get Debian working to do what I want, how on earth is my mum or grandma ever going to have Debian working to do emails and look at the web and tap out a letter or two to relatives around the globe??? The dist with the "pop the cd in and away you go" attitude will be the one that makes it to the masses. That has already happened, its called "MS Windows". In fact pre-installed takes away installation fears entirly. My mother has never installed an o/s and never will. Why should she? she has never installed a car engine either, yet she has driven for years. Debian is difficult for geeks to get working just the way they want, let alone for average joes. So this has led me to my conclusion, why do I stick with debian? is it for stability? no I use mature *nix's for that at the places where I work, TRUE64, AIX, HPUX, SCO, these are what have always dominated the market place (no prizes for guessing which UNIX will win!). LINUX??? nope, sorry, we install windows for cheap servers and desktops. So it must be because I like being elitist and lump these experiences in with my ability to use vi, proud of it simply cos others can't. how pathetic.
You wouldn't buy a piece of hardware in the store unless it said on the box that it supported not only windows in general, but the particular VERSION of Microsoft Windows which you presently have installed.
How is it fair to expect more out of Linux.
Many Linux drivers are made by volunteers working their asses off so that you can run your shiny new hardware with as little fussing as possible.
If you want more Linux supported hardware, vote with your wallet.
Be sure that your browser reports your OS as GNU/Linux.
Buy a CD set of Redhat or Suse or whatnot instead of the copy of WindowsXP Home Edition on the shelft next to it.
If you do buy hardware that ends up not being supported, write to the manufacturer and state why you will be returning to their product and exchanging it for a different one.
It is the responsiblity of the MANUFACTURER to provide drivers for THEIR hardware.
It is YOUR responsibility to let manufacturers know that there is a MARKET for hardware with Linux drivers.
Help out or get out.
The only thing 'intimidating' about the Debian install is that it is curses-based.
...And what qualified administrator doesn't know what hardware is in the systems he or she manages?
It is incredibly simple if you know what hardware is in your system.
At the boot prompt on the CD, pass the option "bf24" for a 2.4.18 kernel (its in stable).
1. Select language
2. Select keyboard layout
3. Partition
4. Map created partitions to mount points
5. Select which kernel modules you want loaded for your hardware
6. Enter root password and network config
7. Install and make partition bootable
8. Reboot
9. Select timezone
10. Add the stable/main repository and the Debian security updates repository to your apt sources list
11. Setup is done
12. Now, "apt-cache search" for the software you want.
13. "apt-get install" the packages for the software you want and go through configuration options for the pacakages as prompted
Finding out what hardware is in your system is the most important step. Google search or search on the various linux hardware compatibility websites to see which additional modules your hardware will require.
14. Browse the Debian security document at the Debian Project website
Be sure to configure the iptables firewall if the machine will have a public interface exposed.
user level servers are the right direction
the superuser is pretty evil
so much effort is put into rootkits and escalating privileges, imagine a world where there are no privileges to escalate, where file creation is forever and incremented backups are built in complete with block level archiving (if the block is already in the archive then don't bother [& then imagine backing up 100 windows clients to it]). Add single sign-on for the whole network (where no passwords are ever even on the wire let alone in the clear) and a few other new ideas such as a regex replacement for the mess that is file association and it's ilk.
Think Hurd will ever be there?
As you may have gathered there's no need to imagine
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
I'm a Windows user and I am appalled at how much you say this Debian thing is better than my Windows. Just because you have some technical skill doesn't mean Windows is more useless. I have applications I use on Windows and they are just fine!
Because of you, I'm not going to even dream about Debian for another 2..erm.. 3 years!
(you are on your way to destruction...make your time...hahaha)
I got a little carried away :-) (and actually learned something, too ;-)
Lets keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Slashdot leader Coyboy Neal says that there are 40 people at Slashdot who use preview. How many previewers at other forums are there? Well, lets see. The ratio of crap on other forums to Slashdot is 2. Ergo, there are 20 people on other forums who use preview. A recent article said that Wikis take up 50% of the previewing market. Therefore, 60 people on Wikis preview, totaling to a mere 120 previewers.
All major surveys show that previewing has rapidly decereased in popularity. If previewing continues at all it will be about grammar nazis, Wiki freaks, and hobbyists. For all pratical purposes, previewing is dead.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- Hanlon's Razor
nice comment dan
Linux is upheld in a great way by the users. You don't *have* to use the main debian servers, so as more users start creating their own mirrors - we could see one of two things:
/w a desktop is run on a debian system and it runs much more efficiently than a more powerful system (CPU/RAM) did using RedHat.
a) More up-to-date stuff available as an apt/deb package
b) More crap as people put untested solutions up
I think that really, we'll see both (a) and (b), until such as timet as a set of more up-to-date but trustable debian nodes emerges on top.
Regardless, I just switched my main server from RH to debian... and anyone would be hard-pressed to tell me that RH handles better in a business environment... ven my laptop
I'm in japan too and got a gift of a pentium II 266. RedHat was quite slow on it ....but I installed debian from a Knoppix CD and using FluxBox it runs quite nicely. My friend was quite impressed as he'd seen my attempts at trying other distros and their sluggishness.
> My solution? I bought a new machine and installed Debian via the net. It is just WONDERFUL.
I wonder if you'd still think Red Hat such a turd if you'd bothered to get the current release back in December and installed that. Comparing current Debian to ANCIENT Red Hat has to be one of the most foolish things I've ever heard.
If you're going to make such a comparison, at least use relatively same-time versions of distributions. You may as well have compared Debian to Windows 95.
> > (1) Serious philosophical principles. The only
> > people to say GNU/Linux with a straight face.
> Yeah. All other people are laughing out loud
> trying to say GNU/Linux...
Those same people then go through round after round of "Do you mean Linux the kernel, or Linux the operating system?" Remember, SCO's handwaving is made much easier because nobody knows what they mean when they say "Linux".
If we reserved "Linux" for the program that actually has that name, and used "GNU" for the operating system that actually has that name, confusion would be reduced.
You're braver than I am
Last time I got a new bios to install on a PC (compaq En), the computer was rendered completely cactus afterwards.
I can cope with swapping hard drives and re-installing O/S but no idea how to fix a dead bios.
Freebsd on 80 gig by itself was ok for some strange reason, it was the dual boot with win98 that refused to work. I don't think win nt would run my scsi scanner arrangement, the kernel protection probably would stop it. That was the point of having the dual boot.
Eventually I think I'll get a new machine for the gateway and just run freebsd on it (or something) and restore the orignal PC with 2gig and win98. When I originally set the thing up in 1996 I thought 2 gig was huge and div'd the whole thing up into 250MB partitions, which win95 promptly ate.
I always knew that your need for computer power (or any other space) always expands to at least 110% of capacity.
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.