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.

Comments

I like the wording of that..

[SlowCoder]

"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*

Re:I like the wording of that..

[caffeinex36]

Well, not in a corporate environment I don't see it much.

Usually, if at all linux....its RH. :(

sad...but true...
-Rob

Re:I like the wording of that..

[CompWerks]

What's wrong with RH? It's made the most headway in developing a true alternative to M$. Anyway you cut it RH helps all linux distro's across the board.

Re:I like the wording of that..

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course you don't see Debian in the corporate enviroment. You don't see Slackware or LFS, either! RedHat and SuSe get the corporate markets becuase the provide the backup and support that corporates need. The partner with major hardware suppliers and ISV's. They can talk that weird language called "Business".

While Redhat and SuSe are doing all this, Debiam is three years out of date and squabling over the word "free" in BigBobsSuperDuperMega Licence Version 9e1, and wether or not the last Star Wars film was any good.

Re:I like the wording of that..

[CompWerks]

Unfortunately, I can't argue with that.

Re:I like the wording of that..

[Malc]

"Debiam is three years out of date"

That's just tripe, and you know it. I have no idea why you got moderated up twice for spreading FUD. I use Mandrake and Debian at home, and Red Hat and Debian at work. Debian is pretty modern.

Re:I like the wording of that..

[kronsrepus]

The New Zealand Electoral Department is (apparently) moving all of their desktop machines nationwide to run Debian linux. Now if that goes ahead as planned, that'll be a HUGE victory for Debian.

This news coming just after the NZ Govt signed some huge Microsoft deal...

Re:I like the wording of that..

[Anonymous Coward]

> ... Debiam is three years out of date ...

If you consider the derivitives of Debian, such as Knoppix, you can't say that it is out of date. Knoppix has absolutely the easiest installation of any operating system out there (unless you want to go back to DOS ("format c: /S" was pretty easy).

Re:I like the wording of that..

[Anonymous Coward]

So, if a package is included in RedHat, it is ok to use. But if the the same package is in Debian unstable, it is not? Because it's more unstable?

Re:I like the wording of that..

[Malc]

No, stable only. Besides, unstable doesn't offer us anything on our servers that we can't get from stable.

Re:I like the wording of that..

[sqlrob]

Please explain the inclusion of GCC 2.96 in RH then.

Re:I like the wording of that..

[arivanov]

Debian is better for corp usage then the "corp" distros. I do not like dealing with broken machines and Debian happily achieves it.

Re:I like the wording of that..

[sqlrob]

And Postgre or MySQL (don't remember which offhand). There was a warning on the site for users to use the RPMs and not build from source.

In that case, it wasn't a case of not compiling, but table corruption that didn't occur with ANY other version except 2.96.

Re:I like the wording of that..

[Genyin]

and the kernel, and reiserfs, and...

redhat's 2.96 was crap until 7.3, when they fixed most of the bugs.

Re:I like the wording of that..

[Gleef]

It depends on who makes the decision as to what to use in a corporate environment.

If English-speaking non-technical executives decide to pick a Linux distro, I'd say they overwhelmingly seem to choose Red Hat, since that's the one they're most likely to know / Dell's most likely to pre-install.

If technical staff is allowed to make the decision, Debian makes a much better showing. In my experience, over half of these installations are Debian, Red Hat being second most popular.

Re:I like the wording of that..

[BrokenHalo]

And all of the Australian ISPs I have dealt with over the last 7 years run Debian on at least some of their servers.

Re:I like the wording of that..

[MSG]

That's easy. Red Hat's customers wanted a compiler that was compliant with the C++ spec. They also wanted a compiler that worked across all of Red Hat's supported platforms. Released versions of gcc could not meed these needs. The Red Hat employees who are also gcc maintainers recommended that a specific, stable snapshot be branched and maintained until the release of gcc 3.0.

http://www.redhat.com/advice/speaks_gcc.html

Re:I like the wording of that..

[sqlrob]

Nothing there addressing the DB problem I mentioned in a comment above however.

Re:I like the wording of that..

[Rebar]

Unfortunately, if you want to run Oracle, you are stuck with RedHat Advanced Server or United Linux. Of course if you are buying Oracle you can afford RedHat AS also, and up2date isn't bad, but I would certainly prefer Debian.

Re:I like the wording of that..

[Sentry21]

What's wrong with RH? It's made the most headway in developing a true alternative to M$.

I'm sorry, but when did the point of Linux become 'to destroy MS'? I always thought it was about making good software that people want to use, and sharing it with everyone so the people can benefit. Red Hat seems more interested in making a profit - and as a corporation, that is, in fact, the one thing they exist to do. I disapprove of this. It's like totalitarian communism - 'everyone helps everyone (to help me)'.

Redhat, as I've said before, is the MS of the Linux world. Which is not to say it's evil, but it certainly doesn't have the quality that Debian does, for one major reason: customers. Debian has users, Red Hat has customers. Red Hat has to provide new versions to its customers on a timetable. They can't afford to wait until things are finished, they have to get it out the door.

Debian, on the other hand, does not have that limitation. Debian releases happen when they're done, when they're ready to get burned onto a CD and downloaded by the ISO and dist-upgraded, and not a second before. Debian releases are done right, and the long release cycle is because they take the time to do it right the first time. THAT is what Linux and open-source should be about. Not doing it first, but doing it right.

Anyway you cut it RH helps all linux distro's across the board.

Not really, no. Red Hat has a horrible history of security holes, including (for example) keeping Wu-FTPd as the default FTP daemon, despite security hole after security hole, for over four years (or at least, four years of everyone criticizing them for being so stupid). They leave spades of ports open in the default installation, because someone might some day need them, instead of providing an option to turn them on later. They provide a packaging system that, at its best, is mediocre. They corporatize Linux, and make everyone feel as though they have to compete to be better. They made such a big deal about being the only Linux out there that corporations only support Red Hat - which severely hurts other Linux distros. Oracle, for example, is only supported on Red Hat. True, that's Oracle's fault, but Red Hat's boisterious success has marginalized distros that don't have overly commercial gains, and that hurts everyone across the board.

--Dan

Re:I like the wording of that..

[CompWerks]

I'm sorry, but when did the point of Linux become 'to destroy MS'?

First of all I never once said the word destroy - I simply said "alternative"

Red Hat seems more interested in making a profit - and as a corporation, that is, in fact, the one thing they exist to do.

Second of all, what's wrong with making a profit? It's refreshing to see that some major corporate enterprises moving to RH. As I said before it's overall a good thing for the Linux community - the more it get's used, the more it gets better, and the more it offers it's self as a viable alternative to the M$ empire (No matter what Distro you pick)

Also, let's not forget that the RH iso's are freely available for d/l, which is more then I can say for some of the other distro's. So I scratch my head trying to figure out why you would say that they "only" care about making a profit.

They are simply trying to make money by offering support services and some more robust solutions geared towards the corporate enterprise marketplace. If you don't need the support then don't pay for it and RH is as free as it can get.

Not really, no. Red Hat has a horrible history of security holes, including (for example) keeping Wu-FTPd as the default FTP daemon, despite security hole after security hole, for over four years (or at least, four years of everyone criticizing them for being so stupid).

Do you actually run Debian? It's great stuff but your living with blinders on if you think Debian hasn't had it's fair share of problems. Granted, they are mostly relegated to installed apps, but then so are RH's

Re:I like the wording of that..

[nutznboltz]

I'm sorry, but when did the point of Linux become 'to destroy MS'?

Day one.

Re:I like the wording of that..

[rnws]

And every ISP I have worked for (it's been a few, since 2.0 had just come out as I recall) has run Debian (and I got hired by the first one as the Windows geek.)

One of the reasons is one of the self-same reason that RedHat created the "server" variant of it's line - it moves more slowly than the mainstream version so you (in the commercial sense) know that it's not going to change tomorrow - it's something you can rely on (not to be different by 9am tomorrow.) IT pros *like* predictability and reliability (one of the reason's all that old mainframe code is still out there.)

I must say the thing that pisses me off the most is people who say the installation is hard - no, it's not. All I have ever done with Debian is just sit there, make some choices and tap the enter key (ok, type the hostname and such too ;-)
Many of my (newbie) friends have had the same experience, "I heard it was hard?" Just keep hitting enter. "Wow, that didn't hurt at all."

Where does this idea that it's hard come from? The fact that it's text-based? Well that certainly didn't hinder Microsoft from growing into a giant with things like MS-DOS and Windows 3.x or id Software with all of it's dos-based games, or Novell or any of the *nixes either.

Sure it can be a bitch when something is missed by the installer but so are all of them - and Debian can be a damn sight more interactive during install than some of the graphical routines out there (that want to treat you like a Mac or Windows user and hide the really useful, powerful bits from you.)

So yeah, maybe Debian is a slow, sure, wrinkly old tortise but dammit I need that kinda reliability in my business.

Re:I like the wording of that..

[loginx]

I doubt the parent would have been modded down as Troll if I had said GENTOO SUCKS NUTS!!!
But yeah say something about god-forsaken-debian on /. and get flamed.

Re:I like the wording of that..

[Sentry21]

No, that's the (misguided) point of the open-source movement's worst figurehead. Linux (as in Linux) has no such purpose. It was started as an experimental project, and participated in as a hobby.

Having a goal in mind to attack someone isn't a very noble goal. It's destructive, and that never works out. The point should be to have a goal of creating something, and letting that stand on its own merit. The obsession with Microsoft is unhealthy, both psychologically and in terms of open-source projects. People should be able to make software that is good in its own right, without having a destructive purpose, or it won't get anywhere good.

Put simply, if Linux is meant to be a competitor to Windows, then when Windows is gone, Linux is purposeless. If, instead, its goal is to make a stable, secure, and versatile operating system, then it can outlast dead competitors instead of stagnating.

--Dan

Re:I like the wording of that..

[hunterskye]

Debian does not try to be bleeding edge nor does it try to be Linux for the masses. I am not a Linix guru by any means, yet Debian is my distribution of choice because it still gives me choices. Since Debian does not rest on a commercial foundation, it will continue to thrive and will still be around when several more commercial ventures go belly-up. Glenn

Re:I like the wording of that..

[nutznboltz]

No, that's the (misguided) point of the open-source movement's worst figurehead.

Do you really think that this movement could have been started by a pacifist? When RMS announced a project to develop a free UNIX-replacement everybody demonstrated that they believed it could not be done. In 1984 things were different than in 1991 because the world was changing due to his actions.

It was started as an experimental project, and participated in as a hobby.

Define "start". To me things that come first are the start.

The point should be to have a goal of creating something, and letting that stand on its own merit.

Creation and destruction are two aspects of the same process. Trying to separate them is meaningless. Every time you improve Linux you approach closer to the point where MicroSoft is obsolete.

*sigh* Already slashdotted, article text:

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:*sigh* Already slashdotted, article text:

[Mr2cents]

I don't think Debian is going to collapse soon, But I do agree the installer could use some rethinking. Things I would like to see included: System recovery (using distributed backups over the lan), hardware autodetection, an installation blog - or something like that where you can put your installation remarks/choices, etc. Also, I'm looking for a command that would backup all config files that have been changed, or all files not managed by apt.

Also, if there were a central repository for those installation blogs, developers could easily see where most of the problems arise.. Just some random thoughts..

Re:*sigh* Already slashdotted, article text:

[Malc]

"he way the average Joe User is going to see it: Oh, Red Hat has Apt now, cool. I'll use that instead of Debian. "

Unfortunately, Jow User doesn't realise that it isn't Apt itself that makes Apt great. It's the effort that goes in to creating the packages correctly that Apt uses. Broken and poorly maintained packages will render Apt as useful as RPM.

Re:*sigh* Already slashdotted, article text:

[JanneM]

You are probably aware of this, but just to clear some misconceptions:

rpm deb

apt up2date Red Carpet

In other words, rpm (like deb) is a package format. Apt (like up2date, red carpet nad a number of others) is a system for downloading and installing packages, finding and solving dependencies between packages and so on.

Running apt on redhat still means using rpm - it's just that you use apt as the manager, instead of using the rpm tools directly to do stuff manually. As packages, rpm and deb are pretty much equal; rpm has gotten a bad rap in part because rpm based distros typically did not have a package manager earlier, and foremost, because there was no solid, single repository for them with people dedicated solely to find and fix inconsistencies and conflicts before pushing them out to users.

Re:*sigh* Already slashdotted, article text:

[Vitus Wagner]

Why care so much about Joe User?
Let RedHat, ALT Linux and other commercial firms
care about them. They would get their revenues
and give their contribution to OpenSource world,
including Debian.

Users switch to Debian not from Windows (or complete
computer illiteracy), but rather from other Linux
distro's.

Personally I switched to Debian from RH (four or five years
ago) when I found out, that when I need some piece
of software which is not included in my distro,
I routinely go to ftp.debian.org and grab orig.tar.gz from there.

There should be at least one distro in the world,
which cares about clever people, not stupid ones.

Debian perfectly fill that niche. It is created
by clever people and targetted to clever people.

With apt-get dist-upgrade who need installer
at all, once he learned how dump/restore work?
And for first time in the life you better
to call some more experiencd friend.

Re:*sigh* Already slashdotted, article text:

[Delphis]

something like that where you can put your installation remarks/choices

Of course dpkg --get-selections is asking too much ;)

Putting your config files (i.e. /etc/) into a CVS would be a good idea too, then you can just do a 'cvs up' to retrieve the changed files...

Re:*sigh* Already slashdotted, article text:

[HiThere]

Debian's installer is already several years behind those of other distributions. Don't make it worse by wishing extra features on it.

It's very important that the improved Debian installer be released.

Well, actually that's a bit wrong. Not much, but slightly. It's very important that the installer probe for hardware and do X Window setup and initialization. The installer itself and be text based, though of course that's not ideal.

Part of the reason for this is that people don't usually build their own computers. I find it cheaper to buy them. But then I don't really know the components (and I've been quite surprised at times). Hardware probing resolves this issue quite nicely. (Mind you, you should be able to override this if you KNOW what the correct answer is...but don't be surprised if you're wrong. Mfg.s have occasionally shipped two different chips with the same part number on them. Probing handles this correctly, but manual configuration doesn't.)

I understand the Debian insistance that their installer be able to handle any supported hardware, whether Intel, or Strongarm, whether 16 or 64 bits. But I'm not sure that I agree with it. It might be best to put in an interim installer. Still...it's not my project. And if they are near completion, pushing ahead is probably the best option. But don't ask for extra frills to slow them down. Those can wait for a later release.

(OTOH, I've been quite happy with LibraNet, so perhaps the specialized Debian installer need is already being filled.)

Re:*sigh* Already slashdotted, article text:

[lpret]

I agree. Let the nerds have their distro, let the business world have the main ones. *ducks*

Debian should not get into the "Joe User" mode, because it alienates the only people that use it. Let RedHat, Mandrake, and SuSe fight over Joe User. Just as long as it's linux.

Re:*sigh* Already slashdotted, article text:

[HiThere]

The problem with up2date is the server. You can only use the specified server, which is available on a subscription basis. You can't use anything else. (I'm sure this is realtively easy to solve, but that's the way it's released.)

RedCarpet updates leave you with a system which can't be upgraded with a later set of Red Hat CDs. This is no big deal if you keep /home, /usr/local, and any specialized directories on separate partitions. Not unless you do a lot of customizing of the system scripts. You can just do a reinstall instead of an upgrade. But it sure is a nuisance. (Also, when Red Carpet switched to the rcd [Red Carpet Daemon] I was never able to figure out what it was doing. *NOT* ideal. That was a beta, so I assume that they fixed this later. But I switched distributions and lost track.)

Re:*sigh* Already slashdotted, article text:

[HiThere]

I pretty much agree with you, but the installer is needed. (see other posts in this topic.)

However, Debian seems intimately wedded to the internet, and for some cases internet access isn't a plausible approach to updating. (Either you only have very slow access, or you pay by the byte or minute.) True, this very isolation eases security requirements tremendously, but that isn't the only reason for updates.

Re:*sigh* Already slashdotted, article text:

[Laxitive]

System recovery (using distributed backups over the lan), hardware autodetection, an installation blog

Yes, an installation blog is CRUCIAL. What's the point of installing debian if you can't blog it in excruciating detail right next to your much vaunted movie reviews, and internationally recognized kitten-jokes. Ok, sorry, I had to. -Laxitive

Re:*sigh* Already slashdotted, article text:

[xZAQx]

Debian seems intimately wedded to the internet, and for some cases internet access isn't a plausible approach to updating.

Other distro's aren't?

Re:*sigh* Already slashdotted, article text:

[JanneM]

I agree with you fully on each and every drawback you list. My point was, however, that it isn't rpm per se that is the problem (and apt-rpm is a pretty good confirmation of it), and that rpm and apt should not be confused with each other.

That said, up2date and (especially) red carpet are fully as capable as apt; the problem there isn't the tools but how they are deployed. I would actually prefer using red carpet on repositories rather than apt (and synaptic); with apt-rpm it has become semi-standard, however, so that won't probably happen.

Since they all sort of do the same thing, it would be _really_ neat with a server tool that set up a set of directories to be used with apt, red-carpet, urpmi and so on automagically for the server operator - that way everybody could use whatever tool fits them best, and with no extra work for the people running the repositories. Since all those tools are good about differentiating between distributions as well, you could build a server that offered a given set of software for every dist, or even a "mega"-server containing all the stuff anybody will ever want, for every distro out there.

Would be sort of neat if Sourceforge set up something like that. :)

Re:*sigh* Already slashdotted, article text:

[gedeon13]

Users switch to Debian not from Windows (or complete computer illiteracy), but rather from other Linux distro's.

Well... I, for one, switched from Windows to Debian and I'm very happy with it... :)

Re:*sigh* Already slashdotted, article text:

[ichimunki]

Jonathan Oxer is Founder and Technical Director of Internet Vision Technologies, an Australian web application development agency with clients around the world. He is also a Debian developer and cmdrtaco felcher, and was organiser of the Debian Mini-Conf in Perth in January 2003 in association with Linux Conf Australia where he presented one of the technical papers.

Moderators: if you're going to mod up a repost of an article, please make sure it has been reproduced faithfully. Really, do you people even read the posts you're moderating, or do you just look for keywords and then vote accordingly?

Re:*sigh* Already slashdotted, article text:

[StarFace]

I agree with this, and while it might sound elitist, I think the "difficult" installation serves to discourage the folks who are not ready for Debian. When I first installed Linux back in 1996, it was Debian. Miraculously, I got it installed, but couldn't really get anything to work after that point (I played around with MegaHAL for a while.) So I downloaded the ISO for Red Hat and ended up using that for a half year before RPM caused me too much grief to be worth it. So I gave Debian another swing and didn't have any substantial problems, I was ready for it.

The reason I think it is good every Joe User doesn't get too far is that the Debian support system would otherwise get flooded with well meaning, but entirely clueless newbies. I say let the companies that are making $100 a pop and have live telephone support systems handle the first-timers. That's what those companies are in business for.

I've never understood this fascination in the community with taking over the world, marketshare, visibility, "growth." I installed Linux in the first place to get rid of all that trash. To run software for the sake of running it. To develop a driver because the hardware exists, and for no other reason. Et ceteral.

Re:*sigh* Already slashdotted, article text:

[Minna Kirai]

In other words, rpm (like deb) is a package format.

Not exactly. rpm is also a package installer program, like Debian's dpkg.

rpm : rpm : up2date
deb : dpkg : apt

A statement comparing "apt vs rpm" is valid, if both are interpreted as software applications.

In fact, that comparison was once very important for Debian evaneglism. Until recently (and maybe still?), rpm was the primary tool for RedHat users to install packages. Before the introduction of RedHat's up2date, comparing "The primary command-line tools to install packages on RedHat and Debian" meant comparing the user-friendliness of rpm and apt-get. Naturally, apt-get won completely, because its featureset is far out of rpm's league.

Re:*sigh* Already slashdotted, article text:

[occupant4]

As a Debian user, I object to this. I spent 3 full days installing my laptop with Debian, and it was not a pleasant experience. One of the biggest problems was the fact that there was no driver for my ethernet card in the kernel, so I had to download one - without an ethernet driver to connect to the Internet, this was pretty difficult.

I like programming and playing around with config files to optimize my setup, but spending 3 days trying to get a computer installed is just ridiculous. I would much rather have popped in a disc, clicked a few buttons, and have it automatically detect and set up my hardware while I do something else. I chose Debian for the single reason that I was sick of dealing with RPM dependencies, and that there were far more packages on apt-deb servers than apt-rpm. I don't understand the pleasure in struggling with an OS for days just to get it to the point where it is as usable as another OS after 2 hours of install.

Re:*sigh* Already slashdotted, article text:

[HiThere]

...Granted, release _Debian_ CDs aren't made that often ...

You can say THAT again. For the RedHat distribution I use on those systems (KRUD) I have a subscription for monthly CDs. Generally pretty good. I generally have had trouble getting Debian CDs less than a year old...(actually, they generally have a release number rather than a date, so this is a really coarse estimate).

Re:*sigh* Already slashdotted, article text:

[gusilu]

Well... I, for one, switched from Windows to Debian and I'm very happy with it... :)

So am I, but at it is true that there is no way in hell I could have done that first install by myself! As a matter of fact, I basically sat through the process trying to figure out what was going on. It was only by playing around, changing stuff, finding out what worked - and what didn't! the hard way for the following weeks, that I finally decided to try and install Debian on an old box that was just sitting there gathering dust.

Well, lets just say that that install wasn't very successfull, though it exceeded expectations. But the whole install process was horrible for someone who doesn't know much about hardware - I ended up guessing a lot of settings, not suprisigly I couldn't get X-server to run.

Only after being guided through a couple more Debian installs, can I say that I might be able to install Debian + X by myself - but only if there's no weird harware involved!

I'm no computer genius, but I don't think I'm incredibly ignorant either. So yeah, Debian's install sucks for an average user and I really hope that it improves a lot for the next release...

Re:*sigh* Already slashdotted, article text:

[fireboy1919]

It is ridiculous. Especially since recompiling the kernel takes much less than three days. You needed some better documentation to tell you this.

I am thoroughly convinced that it is not an unpleasant install experience that's the problem, its that the install isn't robust. Your clicky-clicky idea currently will not lead to such robustness for quite some time, as our hardware is still to finicky for our software to get everything right. DOCUMENTATION, though, can lead to this. If we can document the majority of the process in nice friendly install guides, and the very, very minor problems in help forums, I think we can get even the most obtuse users able to use the software if they're willing to read.

Further, RPM dependency problems are a result of using binary packages, not of the RPM format alone. Specifically compiled .debs will also require very specific library needs. The only way around that is to compile stuff yourself.

The point of struggling with an OS for days to get it to the point where it is as usable as another OS is so that you can change it's capabilities to suit your needs quickly later - something that is more possible with Debian than with Redhat or Mandrake, but still more true of BSD and Gentoo.

Re:*sigh* Already slashdotted, article text:

[NateTech]

Because my boss demands the use of RedHat on servers when Debian would certainly be a much better choice in terms of managing the complexity -- a few apt-get commands and everything's the same. AND the old Sparc boxes could run it... but not RedHat... so we manage Linux/Solaris instead of Linux/Linux.

Plus, Debian "stable" is just that. STABLE. Rock solid. It's always there. Knowing that RedHat tries to hard to stay on the bleeding edge makes package upgrades worrisome. In fact, they've had this anti-upgrade effect on my boss... who chose RedHat to begin with. Hmm... interesting how that decision is messing with things again...

On RedHat, you either pay for RedHat Network, install apt and hope some badly created package doesn't blow up things while using it, install Red Carpet and really screw up the machine, or just don't upgrade. ALL of which are silly in light of the availability of a strict package system like Debian's that WORKS 100% of the time when using "stable".

But... the bosses see RedHat on the shelves and in the news.

So guess what every Linux-based solution has always been used at the companies I've worked for?

When presented with the question "Why?" the answer is usually "because there's commercial support", and "because we've already made that decision" (without any technical forethought, I might add...), but I've not YET seen a company I've worked for EVER pay for commercial support from RedHat -- it's a B.S. response. Considering that one of my employers blew over $100 million in a couple of years time, they definitely had the cash to take advantage of RedHat's advanced services.

The real reason? Marketing. The same reason people use M$ products over better ones. RedHat has them by the eyeballs with the fancy logo and the marketing-speak, and the brain's not engaged. Like moths to a fire...

Re:*sigh* Already slashdotted, article text:

[Mr2cents]

The thing is, every time I install Debian I write down what I do and then I FORGET WHERE I PUT IT! It would be nice if I can access this knowledge from anywhere.

Re:*sigh* Already slashdotted, article text:

[occupant4]

A nice friendly install guide would have gotten me nowhere. I found documentation quite readily with a few google searches. Video card wasn't accelerated, no problem, google for "radeon m6 accelerated linux" and I had several sites telling me what to do. Even the ethernet driver problem wasn't that difficult to solve, once I had a PCMCIA network card to use to connect to the internet.

The problem is not lack of documentation - there is plenty of that. The problem is with the diversity of hardware, you can't provide an easy 1-2-3 install guide for everyone. Everyone's guide will be different. And you seem to imply that in the distant future this problem can be solved, as our hardware gets less "finicky". But since hardware is evolving all the time, I don't think this problem will ever go away.

Also, you seem to associate ease-of-install with lack of robustness. So if debian had built-in support for all my hardware, and automagically detected it all (as Redhat and many other installers do), then somehow it would become less customizable? I don't believe that for a second. Usable defaults does not mean you can't change them.

Linux reference system

[Dionysus]

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.

Re:Linux reference system

[IamTheRealMike]

There already is such a system in the form of the LSB.

The main problems with using Debian as a reference distro are:

a) Not as popular as some other distros (which is not btw just because the clueless masses are stupid, give people some credit).

b) They don't have any real problem breaking binary compat with other distros, see their decision over the libdb mess.

c) The LSB already does it, and is widely accepted, has test cases etc.

Re:Linux reference system

[__past__]

However, Red Hat is the de facto standard

Only in some parts of the world. If you want your package to be used by all these german gouvernment departments switching to Linux now, you should better make sure that it works on SuSE, scince that is pretty much the default distro here. As fas as I understand, it is similar with TurboLinux and Connectiva in their respective markets, so testing for UnitedLinux compatibility right from the start would seem like a good idea if you don't want to piss of people in some of the biggest markets for Linux software.

Re:Linux reference system

[ntrfug]

That idea is unfortunately Dead On Arrival.

The rationale for a reference implentation of Linux was facilitating commercial adoption. The Linux Standard Base, under the influence of commercial interests, elected to specify a package management standard, and the standard adopted was RPM.

I suspected at the time (and I still do) that the reason for this decision was to ensure that Debian (the only major NON-COMMERCIAL distribution) would never become dominant -- it can never be LSB-compliant since it doesn't use RPM packaging.

Re:Linux reference system

[chill]

Debian as a reference platform? Sure, as soon as they get rid of .deb and start using .rpm packages. RedHat, RedFlag, SuSE, Mandrake use RPM, which constitutes the vast majority of non-uber-geek installs.

That'll probably be about the time Steve Ballmer gets praised for his dancing abilities and Bill Gates extolls the virtues of the GPL -- with a straight face.

Hint: "monkey boy" isn't considered praise.

Re:Linux reference system

[lerouxb]

I think gentoo can more easily become the reference implementation. Thats because things are closest to how the individual developers intended them. No redhat/mandrake/debian branding, backports or modified packages.

Besides - apt is old. portage is a new and innovative system. Yes - Gentoo is currently a source-based distro, but they are moving to a reference platform and it is possible to use pre-compiled binary packages.

Many gentoo users are ex-debian users. It might not be as stable as debian stable, but it is more stable than mandrake, redhat and debian unstable. (and more up to date as well)

Re:Linux reference system

[Dionysus]

Isn't LSB just a whitepaper? My point is that with Debian as the reference implementation, you will have an actual distribution to reference.

As to your points, not being that popular works for Debian, since it can't be accused of being partial to one popular distribution over another (which one happen if you made RedHat the reference distribution, for instance).

Breaking binary compatibility won't be a problem for the reference implementation if the reference implementation is the standard, ie. the libdb issue (whatever it was, not familiar with the problem).

Re:Linux reference system

[Dionysus]

Debian has RPM packaging. I don't know how many people have it installed on their Debian system, but Debian do follow LSB in that regard.

Re:Linux reference system

[Dionysus]

Not too familiar with gentoo since I never used it, but is problematic that it is so current. A reference implementation needs to be a little out of date, which is what stable is in Debian.

How many different versions did you have of GCC over the last year in gentoo? Almost every GCC in the 3.x serie have been binary incompatible with the previous version.

Re:Linux reference system

[BrokenHalo]

Debian has RPM packagingSo does Slackware. At least, the standard install CD (Slack only needs one) comes with rpm. That's not to say that it works, though... :-)

Re:Linux reference system

[BrokenHalo]

I have no beef with Gentoo (I use Slackware) but it sems to me that RedHat appears to have a de facto grip on any claim to be a reference system, simply by virtue of its popularity. And yes, some people do manage to get a RedHat or Mandrake system to run stable, though I never did.

Re:Linux reference system

[lemox]

They don't have any real problem breaking binary compat with other distros[...]

Please name one other distribution that actually does have a problem with breaking binary compatibility?

Re:Linux reference system

[Nothinman]

Switching to RPM wouldn't be that big of a deal, except that the RPM database is binary and the dpkg one is plain-text and a lot of people really like plain-text.

Almost all of what makes Debian great can be just as easily done with RPM, apt and dselect (yes, I like dselect). The thing that seperates Debian from RedHat is the process not the package format, it would be just as easy to make RPMs that have great post-install scripts that make use of debconf to keep all the packages integrated.

Re:Linux reference system

[Nothinman]

Thats because things are closest to how the individual developers intended them. No redhat/mandrake/debian branding, backports or modified packages.

So? The original author might not do their development and testing on Debian/RedHat/Mandrake so little tweaks are needed to make it run and integrate well. Distribution patches and branding are necessary to make the package feel like it's part of the distribution, otherwise Debian would just untar a bunch of precompiled binaries into /usr/local and let you sort it out.

Besides - apt is old. portage is a new and innovative system

Innovative? It's not like all of the BSDs have had working ports systems for years or anything.

APT works, I can't think of anything it doesn't do that I've needed it to do, why change it?


It might not be as stable as debian stable, but it is more stable than mandrake, redhat and debian unstable. (and more up to date as well)


I've been running unstable for a while now and nothing major has broken, infact I can't think of anything breaking since the last perl transition and even that wasn't that bad. apt-listbugs helps catch anything that might cause big problems, it's not rocket science.

Re:Linux reference system

[dvdeug]

it [Debian] can never be LSB-compliant since it doesn't use RPM packaging.

Debian is LSB-complaint, as much as anyone else is. LSB-complaint doesn't mean that you have to use RPM; it means you have to be able to install LSB packages, which happen to be a specialized subset of RPM internally, which Debian can.

Re:Linux reference system

[lerouxb]

My point is that you shouldn't have a popular commercial distro as the standard. RedHat has been known to implement things their own way, to shift them around and to even change things like Gnome and KDE. If they are the standard, then they will steer things their way.

They contribute a lot to the linux community, yes, but its all to benefit redhat.

Maybe the Debian people are right with one thing, though - the reference platform should probably be something older. Otherwise the distros will have a hard time to keep up. But if its too old (like debian stable) then it might counter innovation.

I should just shut up and enjoy gentoo. Its everything I need. And I respect that others might want/need something else. Thats why different distros exist.

Re:Linux reference system

[Baloo Ursidae]

Why should Debian drop .deb when Red Hat's answer is the one that sucks?

Re:Linux reference system

[chill]

The same reason that everyone ended up with VHS and not Beta...

Because RPM is used by many more people than .deb, and because the LSB specifies .rpm and not .deb.

Because what is chosen as the standard frequently isn't the technically best solution but that is the way it is.

Re:Linux reference system

[Baloo Ursidae]

You know, I think a good counterargument to all this Debian is dying nonsense is Why We Need Debian. Back when I was starting to use Linux back when Red Hat 5.2 and Debian bo were current, all the howtos matched Debian, not Red Hat. This is still, for the most part, true today. Debian's packages always made sense. Even if they were from a third party (or later from a different Debian based distro) they made damn sure that all the package names matched up between Debian and themselves.

It seems to me like the LSB was really looking for a problem Debian already solved better.

Re:Linux reference system

[chill]

If I remember the original article, I don't think the claim was "Debian is Dying", but rather "Debian is becoming maginalized by the big commercial distros" and "the general public doesn't know we are here".

I doubt Debian will die, but I also doubt it will become "main stream" with the general public. That just isn't Debian's goal and personally I think it isn't in their best interest. To do so would require them to turn into something that would no longer be Debian.

Yeah watch out

[Yuioup]

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

Re:Yeah watch out

[drewbradford]

KNOPPIX

Re:Yeah watch out

[wwwillem]

So Debian should be more of a VHS than a Betamax if it wants to stand a chance...

[off-topic]
Yeah, I worked for Philips with their technically also superior V2000 system. The story goes that that never made it, because the "family owned" company didn't "encourage" the release of V2000 P0RN movies :-).

[on-topic]
I'm myself pretty happy with using RH in the office and Debian for hacking around at home. Good article, but Joe Doe will never know about apt, because they don't know already about rpm. Stuff like Walmart/Lindows is the answer there. But let's not forget: Commodore 64 is a thing of the past, but Apple is still around, so "the masses" don't always win.

[???-topic]
So maybe Debian P0RN is the answer to the improved "usability and visibility" in the article :-) The new future for APT-Get-Unstable ....

Re:Yeah watch out

[Delphiki]

Is Debian really technically superior? After I had been using Linux for a while and had gotten the hang of installing things via RPM, portage, tarballs, etc, and editing config files, et all, I tried Debian. I hated it. If Debian had been the first Linux distribution I had ever used I would have returned to Windows and not looked back. Apt is better than RPM in some ways, but I still found it extremely awkward after having worked with portage.

But what bugs me most is the attitude Debian users seem to have, which is an air of ridiculous elitism. Of course this isn't true of all Debian users, but at least the most vocal ones I've seen. After having used Debian I can't say that I can see what that elitism is based on.

Anyway, I'm not trying to troll, just suggesting that maybe if Debian fades away, it's not the fault of people who don't look for the highest quality solution as much as the fault of them getting out of touch and too high in their ivory tower.

Re:Yeah watch out

[esper]

Well, if it's all about the porn, then I'd say Debian has a bit of a head start with porn-get.

Re:It's a very good article.

[WPIDalamar]

... and as the people of Australia have already found out, these kind of stories should be kept secret from slashdot for you entire country's connection sake.

Although I use and dearly love Debian

[James_Duncan8181]

I can see that it is clearly not disgned to have that much polish in GUI areas. Debian has been and will (IMHO) continue to be primarily designed for the technical user/Debian Developer, as these are the guys making the design choices. No walkthroughs, no neat GUI config a la Mangrake, not that much focus on usability as the assumption is that almost all users will be technically proficient.

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... ;)

Re:Although I use and dearly love Debian

[Dunkirk]

I'm as critical of Debian as anyone, probably because I really, really like their philosophy. Unfortunately, their philosophy causes them to be about 2 years behind the current average Linux distro. On the other hand, Debian stays this far behind because all the work done to the distro must work across, what?, about 9 different architectures. (Maybe it was 11?) This includes the installer. I've given Debian a whirl, but I haven't made the jump yet. However, there's a chance that I might get a dozen old HP and Sun workstations that are collecting dust at my company, and the thought of being able to run the same Linux distro across both platforms really, really intrigues me. Debian on x86? Well, if you really want to, I guess. But Debian on non-x86? Hands down. "Real" Unix machines that can find their way into hobbyists hands won't be bleeding edge, and Debian's lag will actually be a huge asset to someone wanting to outfit such a machine.

Re:Although I use and dearly love Debian

[Sinistar2k]

When reformatting an old HP Omnibook 2000 (P-133, 1.3gig HD, no CD-Rom), I decided to give Debian (woody) a go because it had the cleanest, purest install I could find without going the route of Gentoo.

Three weeks later, I finally had it working properly.

My first stumblings were because of the installer not liking my PCMCIA card. A purchase of a new card fixed that. But then I got to the package installer and wow... it was one of the most unusable things I had ever encountered. Just when I thought I was getting the hang of it, I would press Enter one too many times and the install would take off before I had even gotten through all the options.

Once I decided to just abandon that and do a base install / apt-get what I need setup, things went better, but then every time I did a startx, my system would lock hard. I worked on that one a long time before breaking down and just installing the 2.4.18 kernel package. Problem solved, but it took a long time for me to get to that point (and a test install of Red Hat had X11 coming up properly the first time).

Then I got blackbox and fluxbox installed to try out some lightweight but functional window managers. Worked great until I ran XDM, which would then vomit all over itself. Finally figured out where in the XSM configuration I needed to make changes. Got that running well.

Fortunately, I didn't need sound, serial, or parallel working on this laptop for the task for which I intended it, otherwise I might have been scratching my balding head even more.

All that said, it's running now. Apt-get is an absolute dream (a package manager that takes care of dependencies for me? Sweet joy!). But my difficulty in getting basic things done was enough that I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. Had the laptop been a bit beefier, I would have given up after day three and gone straight to Red Hat.

So, at this point, I'm enjoying my Debian install, but I wouldn't ever do it again with a system that I considered critical or that had to be up and running quickly.

Re:Although I use and dearly love Debian

[AME]

I left RH because I didn't like the GUI config tools - I like to hack on the init.d scripts to make them do just what I want.

Then why didn't you do that? Or did your copy of RedHat come with a gun and instructions to hold it to your own head and force yourself to use the GUI tools?

I, for my part, use the GUI tools where they serve, and edit the configs and scripts when the GUI falls short. No problems.

Re:Although I use and dearly love Debian

[bitspotter]

Let's not forget Lindows, which, for all it's commercial character (which is really the only way to get Joe User the support he needs), is both Debian based and pointed at Joe User desktops.

Trying to characerize various distributions as mutually exclusive is short sighted. Building technologies upon others is a real strength of open source. If the core of Debian remains focused on "expert-friendly" implementations, there's no reason others cannot focus on building usability on top of it. And they do.

If the author wanted to hand his hypothetical newbie a Debian CD, he could just hand him Knoppix. I've done it lots of times. It's fantastic.

What debian should do

[ultrabot]

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"

Re:What debian should do

[Anonymous Coward]

for a server, run the STABLE. For a desktop system that is running the cutting edge use UNSTABLE/TESTING.

It's what I do and it works fine. I have had many long uptimes and would have even longer ones if it weren't for kernel recompiles..

Re:What debian should do

[jbr439]

I use Debian and run testing/unstable. I would rather just run testing, but since testing is stuck with evolution 1.0.5 (versus 1.4.0 in unstable), kde 2.2.25 (vs 3.1.1), mozilla 1.0.0 (vs 1.3.1), etc, etc, I have no real choice.

This works for me because I'm sufficiently careful and technically competent enough to work thru the inevitable issues. It won't work for any number of other people.

IMHO, Debian does need to do something to provide a more up to date desktop. The big issue with this seems to be the multi-platform support that Debian is rightly proud of. However, it also seems to hold Debian back. At the risk of committing Debian heresy I would suggest that Debian implement 2 classes of platforms. This would prevent the situation whereby a problem in a little used platform stops a package from advancing in all platforms. Obviously x86 (where x >= 5) would be a 1st class platform; perhaps PPC would be as well.

With a 2 class platform situation the vast majority of Debian users could expect to have an up to date, stable system and those using a 2nd class platform would have to wait a while longer, but would eventually get there as well.

Yes, I realize that I will be flamed for suggesting that Debian discriminate, but so be it. IMO practicality trumps principle in this case.

My biggest compliant with debian

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:My biggest compliant with debian

[KjetilK]

I agree on most of your points.

I'm a Debian user, not a developer, and I chose Debian for two main reasons: I like to understand what goes on, and many distros try to hide things from me to be "friendly". I don't have anything against RTFM, at least to a great extent. The other reason is that it is the most free distro around. Additionally, I had many good friends using Debian, always somebody I can call up.

However, I'm not capable of packaging anything myself, and I'm not a hacker. I'm a newbie. Things are hard, even after RTFMing...

Woody is allready terribly outdated, security packages like snort and nessus are pretty much useless. Then, KDE 3 is a whole lot more stable in my experience than KDE 2.2.2 which is in Woody. SpamAssasin must be kept up-to-date in the arms race with spammers. Exim is so old, people on the Exim-lists can't help you because they don't remember how Exim 3 was configured...

There are many who cries for an easier install, but I don't. It wasn't that hard, even for a newbie like me. Just had to call up my friends a few times. Debian folks are very helpful.

It seems like Sarge is following pretty much the same path as Woody did, released when really big things has been done. What I would like to see is Sarge being just an updated Woody. No new installer, no new groundbreaking stuff, just updated packages, Snort, Exim 4, Apache 2.0, KDE 3.1, GNOME 2.0, etc. Up-to-date, tested and out the door...

That's what I would like to see, but I realize there is very little I can do to help it happen.

Re:My biggest compliant with debian

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know why this comment was cut and pasted anonymously from another story about debian, but it's cheap karmawhoring.

Re:My biggest compliant with debian

[Malc]

"SpamAssasin must be kept up-to-date in the arms race with spammers.

It catches 87% of the spam I receive. Not bad eh for an old version? I'm saving all my spam in another folder... hopefully in a later version of Debian, I will be able to use it to train the new SpamAssassin's Bayesian filters.

Malc

Re:My biggest compliant with debian

[po8]

If you know what you want, you can run stable plus a few packages from unstable. It's a total and unecessary pain to set up, and then works like a charm forever ("the Debian Way"). Edit your /etc/apt/preferences file to have

Package: *
Pin: release a=stable
Pin-Priority: 500

Package: *
Pin: release a=unstable
Pin-Priority: 495

Now you can say apt-get -t unstable install foo and the foo package will be installed from unstable and will be maintained. Have fun!

Re:My biggest compliant with debian

[FattMattP]

It catches 87% of the spam I receive. Not bad eh for an old version?

Very bad, IMO. SpamAssassin 2.53 catches 99% of my spam. Out of thousands of spam messages filtered, I've only had a handful (maybe 30-40) end up in my inbox with two false positives. This was over the last four months.

Re:My biggest compliant with debian

[griswld]

Yes, on the kde website add it to your /etc/apt/souce.list then apt-get update and apt-get update . They have kde 3.1.2

Re:My biggest compliant with debian

[edbarrett]

Look here, about halfway down the page for the line to add to your sources.list to install KDE 3.1.2 for Debian stable.

Re:My biggest compliant with debian

[greydmiyu]

The biggest problem with your complaint is that you're limiting yourself to stable. Stable is just that, stable. Of the many Debian boxes that I've maintained there is only one that I left on stable. That box being the gateway machine that NATs between my parents' Windows boxen and their ADSL connection. Being that it is 400+ miles away I kept it on stable for months so I wouldn't have to either try to talk my dad through fixing it nor makinga 5+ our drive to do it when we both got too frustrated to try to work through any problems over the phone I knew I could solve in 10m. Of course now it is sitting on testing.

My current Debian box is running unstable. It's been said before, I'll say it again. Debian's unstable is often far more stable than other distribution's "stable" release. I have been riding unstable for close to 5 years now and I can count on one hand the number of times it's caused me problems.... and have fingers left over for the next 5 years.

If you find Debian not "modern" enough for you. Jump up to testing to see how it feels. If you're daring (and anyone running an RPM distro is more daring enough) jump to unstable. Three rules for riding unstable:

1: Upgrade only what you need to upgrade to get the system working as you please. Leave the rest alone.

2: Use apt-changes and apt-listbugs

3: Use aptitude for most operations that start with "apt-get".

Trust me, it is no worse than any other distribution, about as modern as you can get and stable enough that I bank my main personal server on it.

Re:My biggest compliant with debian

[#undefined]

deb http://download.kde.org/stable/3.1.2/Debian stable main
deb-src http://download.kde.org/stable/3.1.2/Debian stable main

Re:My biggest compliant with debian

[#undefined]

i highly recommend going with stable (currently woody) and using backports to stay up-to-date on packages that you need/want.

# snort (from the debian maintainer himself)
deb http://people.debian.org/~ssmeenk/snort-stable-i38 6/ ./
deb-src http://people.debian.org/~ssmeenk/snort-stable-i38 6/ ./

# kde
deb http://download.kde.org/stable/3.1.2/Debian stable main
deb-src http://download.kde.org/stable/3.1.2/Debian stable main

for spamassassin, take your pick.

for nessus, look here again.

for other packages, search here.

apt repositories on people.debian.org are not official packages, but unofficially maintained/packaged by official debian maintainers, so these people are familiar with debian policy (and "policy" is an official document, not just a familiar way of doing things).

email the official maintainers and ask if they can recommend a backport repository for their package. or backport the package yourself using apt-src (which you first have to backport by hand from unstable; as easy as wget, dpkg-source -x *.dsc, cd package-version, dpkg-buildpackage -b -us -uc -rfakeroot, cd .., dpkg -i *.deb). i've personally backported airsnort, alsa, dia, esound, ethereal, freeswan, gaim, gnucash, gnupg, grip, jabber, kismet, nessus, psi, spamassasin, tcpdump, wget, wine, xcdroast, and more lesser known packages, so it's possible, but usually you can find someone else who's already backported the package you want.

let debian stable take care of the parts of your system that you just want to work, and use backports to allow you to trade aged stability for new features.

Debian has the problem the whole Linux world has..

[Anonymous Coward]

... 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.)

On the subject of Debian

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

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.

Re:On the subject of Debian

[qtp]

Every distro has it's fanatics, hell, I've run into several RedHat bigots myself. It does make advocacy more difficult when the water has been tainted by people who use thier OS choice as a political statement or use advocacy as an outlet for thier personal axe grinding.

Debian's choice to be all DFSG distro is actually the only practical choice for a non-comercial org producing an OS. The battles in the past over the Troll Tech license had more to do with avoiding future troubles that a vaguely worded or confusing license could produce.

When an org has limited rescources, no comercial structure, and consists entirely of volunteers with no binding contract, then it makes sense to adhere to a very strict only Free Software position.

Re:On the subject of Debian

[arcus]

This is a strange argument to a strange conclusion.

Whether or not Debian's package management system is better has little enough to do with how fanatics behave. They will tell you it's far superior, no matter what the truth of the matter is.

And how can becoming technically inferior relative to the other distributions possibly be good on balance at all, let alone the 'biggest good'?

You can replace 'Debian' with 'Linux', and 'other distros' with 'Windows' throughout, and you're left with the same argument, and the conclusion being that the best thing Linux could do is to focus on not having any advantages over Windows, as that would reduce the ammount of adolescent zealotous behaviour.

Re:On the subject of Debian

[dubiousmike]

Funny, people name their kids the same way.

"There is no way I am naming my kid 'Mike'. I knew a guy named Mike wha was a total jerk.

Anyway, these Debian posts here for the past few days have convinced me to dive into it. Where is the best place for a Debian newbie to start?

Re:On the subject of Debian

[trashme]

There is an installation manual at debian.org. I'd suggest just downloading the first ISO, installing the base system from it and getting the rest of your packages from the net via apt.

That said, even better than an installation manual is to find yourself a knowledgable debian user for your first install. Not only could they help you with any installation troubles, they could also give you a quick tour of the system and a demonstration of apt.

Also, unless you are running a server, you should seriously consider the testing distribution. It's probably a little more buggy than the stable distribution, but much more up-to-date.

Re:On the subject of Debian

[po_boy]

Anyway, these Debian posts here for the past few days have convinced me to dive into it. Where is the best place for a Debian newbie to start?

I recommend using a Knoppix CD to start, install it to your drive, and then update it with apt. It's a pretty good way to get Debian installed quickly with a lot of software and good hardware detection. There's a pretty good installing debian from knoppix howto available.

Re:On the subject of Debian

[N1KO]

This is often one of the primary reasons (if not the single primary reason) people give up on Debian and never bother to try it again.

I've also seen people giving up on Linux in general thanks to Debian fanatics. In linux support channels composed mostly of debian users when the response to a question isn't "RTFM" it's "install debian"

I want my 5 minutes back!

[Reservoir Penguin]

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.

Re:I want my 5 minutes back!

[FranklyMyDear]

I totally agree. Comparing Debian with a simple Linux distro is like apples and oranges. Debian aims to be a universal operating system. It runs on about a dozen different archs and is being ported to at least three different kernels besides Linux. So each release takes a little longer, but so what? We not being rushed by a marketing department. When will it be done? Sooner if you all help.

WTF? Does Redhat also provide over 4K packages in stable testing and unstable forms?

Make that over 8K, and closer to 9K, I think.

Re:I want my 5 minutes back!

[Anonymous Coward]

"Could it be coming from Redhat that he seems to be whoring in the article"

This guy writes like 500 lines about how great Debian is and you point out one line acrediting Redhat and now he works for them? You people used to be amazing, now you're frickin' disgusting.

Re:I want my 5 minutes back!

[Reservoir Penguin]

Actually he wrote a 500 line article how Debian used to be great but now is dying because there is atp4rpm.

Re:I want my 5 minutes back!

[suss]

Does Redhta also provide over 4K packages in stable testing and unstable forms?

4K? there's over 11.000 packages in any of those...

Just run apt-cache stats

How can it be?

[BetterThanCaesar]

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?

Oh Dear God No

[Saint Stephen]

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.

Re:Oh Dear God No

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

What i dont like about debian:

-Only good for servers

Upgrade your MDA video card, you'll see it's pretty good at being a desktop box. Where the hell did you get that ?

-Stable: old

Possibly, but it's stable. That's the main reason to use it. Caldera OpenLinux, which was supposed to be robust as a primary goal, also had outdated but well-tested packages (before Caldera let it grow too old it was useless to everybody).

-Unstable:looking for trouble, and still old

No and no. I use unstable with no problem at all, and I don't find it very out of date. Some things are, but most of the packages are fairly current.

-Licensing issues, cool apps missing

That's partially true. But you can always add non-free sources in your /etc/apt/sources.list. And you can always compile the tarballs if you really need to.

-No xfree 4.3, no mplayer

No mplayer ? hello ?

ppc@akula:~$ apt-cache search mplayer
mplayer-mozilla - Embedded video player for mozilla
mencoder-386 - MPlayer's Movie Encoder
acidrip - ripping and encoding DVD tool using mplayer and mencoder
mencoder-686 - MPlayer's Movie Encoder
mplayer-k6 - The Ultimate Movie Player For Linux
mplayer-doc - Documentation for mplayer
mplayer-fonts - Fonts for mplayer
kplayer - A KDE media player based on MPlayer
mencoder-k6 - MPlayer's Movie Encoder
lumiere - A GNOME frontend to mplayer
mplayer-386 - The Ultimate Movie Player For Linux
mplayer-686 - The Ultimate Movie Player For Linux


-Unfriendly community

Unfortunately, that's true, at least partially.

-Everyone now has apt or an improved version of it
-Installer sucks
-Dselect sucks

dselect and installer do suck, yes. But it's worth the pain IMHO.

Re:Oh Dear God No

[Malc]

"(4) No waiting forever to compile stuff pointlessly.

Just waiting forever for somebody else to compile it for you and a dozen other platforms you don't use ;)

I love Debian. I find it so much easier to maintain server side than our Red Hat boxes. Everything just works. The wait for the development cycle is worth it - everything just works. Don't talk to me about doing a Woody 3.0 net install with / and /boot on Linux RAID though. That's twisted.

Re:Oh Dear God No

[okvol]

I've run an MRTG server on Debian for nearly two years - only downtime was a power outage that extended past my UPS. However, my next generation server will be NetBSD - leaner and meaner, more secure.

I bought a $200 white-box w/o OS from Wal-mart for home use. Tried RH V9 and gave up after third crash. Tried Debian - gave up on KDE and GNOME because of compatability issues, now run TWM and I'm happy. But, I still need to rebuild my kernel for the sound support.

Linux on the desktop? Sure - but you need a guru to rebuild kernels. (But Linux gurus are cheaper than your MCSE's.) Servers - give me a BSD distro anyday. Make me install the options I needed, don't assume I needed them. RH is commercial bloatware that is envious of Microsoft.

Re:Oh Dear God No

[Zigg]

No mplayer ? hello ?

Just to nitpick, I think you got those from Christian Marillat's apt source; they're not in Debian proper.

dselect and installer do suck, yes. But it's worth the pain IMHO.

dselect sucks and is not worth the pain. aptitude, on the other hand, is Very Good. (Incidentally, I wonder if on Red Hat + APT, I can browse packages like I do with aptitude's UI...)

Re:Oh Dear God No

[Delphis]

Sure - but you need a guru to rebuild kernels.

What? Try 'make menuconfig' (or xconfig for pointy-clicky people) then it tells you what to do next (make clean ; make dep ; make bzImage). After that just copy it into /boot and check your lilo config points to it, run 'lilo' to redo the bootloader and you're all set. I use lilo so I dunno about GRUB, which is apparently even easier.

It's really not difficult to do.

Re:Oh Dear God No

[BlueWonder]

Considering that Red Hat doesn't ship non-free software either (and I think this is true of Mandrake also), remind me why Debian is "more concerned with liberty" again?

I would think that Red Hat's primary concern is to make money; they're a company, after all. What software they do and don't ship is influenced by what they think will be best for their profit.

Debian, on the other hand, has a Social Contract. Their motivation for not including non-free software is therefore different from Red Hat's.

Re:Oh Dear God No

[BlueWonder]

I've run an MRTG server on Debian for nearly two years - only downtime was a power outage that extended past my UPS. However, my next generation server will be NetBSD - leaner and meaner, more secure.

Debian is also being ported to NetBSD.

Re:Oh Dear God No

[Cozminsky]

I agree, aptitude is great.

synaptic isn't too bad, however it is X frontend to apt rather than curses so not quite as flexible.

Re:Oh Dear God No

[MystikPhish]

dselect sucks and is not worth the pain. aptitude, on the other hand, is Very Good. (Incidentally, I wonder if on Red Hat + APT, I can browse packages like I do with aptitude's UI...)

I second this notion!
Setting up a new debian box for me usually goes:

1.) Install Debian using netinstall.

2.) # Apt-get install aptitude

3.) Continue to lock down the box, add apps, etc.

Aptitude rocks!

Re:Oh Dear God No

[okvol]

Joe user can't easily do those things. I wouldn't trust my manager. For that matter, do you want them to see the command line?!?

Anyway, Linux desktops could be much easier to admin, since you could script Telnet connections to each box, fire an X session back to your desktop, push pre-built kernels, force reboots, whatever your heart desires.

Consider updates (patches): Test in a controlled environment, then move acceptable/needed patches to a local server. Set the APT source to use that local box, and use Cron to nightly download updates. All w/o extra money for the management apps.

What a wonderful world it could be...

Re:Oh Dear God No

[ichimunki]

Why can't Joe User handle the command line? They did just fine with Apple IIs, C-64s and DOS, didn't they? Give this GUI-only nonsense a rest. It's an education issue... and not a difficult one at that.

As to the kernel question, most of the kernel can be built as modules. Systems like Knoppix and RedHat then use hardware detection to decide which modules to load. Why is anyone recompiling their kernel unless they're a Gentoo geek or using some fairly esoteric hardware? And even then, why wouldn't a sane distro simply package those in a .deb or .rpm?

Re:Oh Dear God No

[tigga]

(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...

People concerned with my liberty

No no no. They concerned about software liberty - not yours.

no walkthroughs?

[martin-boundary]

Of course Debian has walk-throughs. If you've ever installed a few packages, you'll realize that in each case, there's a neat (text) walkthrough of the relevant questions. Moreover, you only see the type of question you're prepared to answer (low priority, medium priority etc.).

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).

Re:no walkthroughs?

[James_Duncan8181]

There is a fully GUI interface for them at the moment - a libgnome frontend that has clicky bits, back and forward etc) The point is that debconf questions are designed for technical users. The way that they are writen reflects this (technical terms without explanation, no nice icons, no suggestions or intelligent guesses/guides).

This is fine for me/other DDs who know what is going on, but is too technical for the average switcher, and is also limited to inital install.

Compare this to a proper GUI like Mandrake Control Centre. This has all of the options needed in one place, easy to access and change at a future date, and with normal english dicriptions and nice pretty graphics (this is important). For instance firewall setup is done through clicking on a labled flame icon, which then gives you firewall on/off radio buttons and a list of tick buttons for allowing various ports labled simply as RealPlayer etc access. This is because it was designed to be a high-level, easy-to-use option, unlike debconf, which is limited to inital install, and tends to assume that the end user is capable of just popping into /etc and changing settings later.

Again the problem is not with Debian technically (where it is excellent), but in the presentation of Deb to the end user. This is shown by the relative popularity of easier Debian-based distros such as Xandros with new users.

What Debian wants to end up with is something more like OSX. Nice eye-candy on the front-end, but with Deb's stability and ability to get dirty with text files for those that can.

Article somewhat optimistic...

[Anonymous Coward]

"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?

what about platform independence?

[martin-boundary]

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.

Re:what about platform independence?

[martin]

umm NetBSD....a few more than Debian..

http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/

Re:what about platform independence?

[chthon]

There is also Debian/BSD

Re:what about platform independence?

[Xouba]

umm NetBSD....a few more than Debian..

Yep. That's why there is Debian/NetBSD.

Re:what about platform independence?

[martin]

yeah Debian should read Debian/GNU-Linux I guess to be totally pedantic(sp?) about it.

Re:what about platform independence?

[Ben Hutchings]

What about it? Joe PC User doesn't even know what that means, and probably wouldn't care even if he did.

Re:what about platform independence?

[cerberusss]

That's extremely sellable to large companies.

Don't be daft... There is only one thing sellable to large companies and that is volume. That's why RedHat is so popular, and SuSe in a lesser degree.

Re:what about platform independence?

[Turmio]

Yeah, so?

Debian runs on NetBSD :)

Re:what about platform independence?

[froseph]

Ahh, but debian has a NetBSD port and a FreeBSD port.

Soon we might even have Debian GNU/Windows ;-)

Re:what about platform independence?

[Delphis]

grammernazi? is that you?

Re:what about platform independence?

[swillden]

Soon we might even have Debian GNU/Windows ;-)

It'll be out six months after Microsoft open sources Windows NT

Is Debian for everyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Is Debian for everyone?

[slartibartfastatp]

Would I recommend it to my little brother who is thinking about Linux but is not the type to...

Well, maybe, but if and only if you're going to install and maintain it

I use myself Debian and have installed it in my dad`s homecomputer, plus KDE, Staroffice and stuff alike, and he`s doing fine using it. But keep in mind that I`m the one who mantain it, so I won`t install a distro which I`m not used to.

Otherwise I`d better tell him to buy himself a Mandrake CD at the drugstore :)

Re:Apt-get

[taree]

Well, maybe ports w/ portupgrade?

Tarmo

Segments

[rf0]

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

Re:Segments

[cavemanf16]

Debian aimed at the server? Yes. Not at the desktop? WRONG!

Yes, I grew up using Windows 3.1 -> Win2k (which I still use today) but I've grown extremely tired of the constant "reinstall yearly to maintain Windows" ideology from Microsoft. It really really REALLY sucks to try and back up 30Gb of data every year from multiple install locations, directories, files, etc. in Windows. I installed Debian on my server (through all the pain and headache of getting it working) to check out how Debian would do as my Linux distro. Guess what? I LOVE IT! Debian is most definitely getting installed on my Windows 2000 machine in a dual-boot configuration when I find the time (and patience) to wrestle with the Debian installer again.

Debian is very much desktop friendly! Who needs a computer that is brought to it's knees on a yearly basis because of sloppy software programming by Microsoft? I like my desktop computer to not completely crap out on me because Winamp playing in the background doesn't like competing for system resources and memory from Mozilla. No, there's many software applications that have not been refined (or even created) for Linux yet, but the Linux OS itself is far more powerful than any Microsoft Windows OS is. Far more stable too!

And when Microsoft can produce Help files that are half as helpful as 'man' pages and all the volumes of Linux "how-to" documents that are freely available online, maybe then Microsoft can take back some market share from Linux. As another person commented on this forum, the freedom of Debian is why I chose it in the first place. I like to have the freedom to do whatever I want with my computer, not what Microsoft tells me to do with it through endless EULA's. Honestly, the ONLY thing that keeps me stuck in a Windows world at home is my gaming habits. I love to play computer games!

Unfortunately, Freeciv and all the other 'free' Linux games just aren't up to snuff with most of their non-free relatives in the Windows world. If HL2 gets ported to Linux and Freeciv gets some more AI work done on it soon, I may just consider wiping out my Windows 2000 partition completely! Oh what liberation that would be...

Re:Segments

[golgotha007]

i've used redhat since 5.2 days, and i configure everything by hand. yes, there are graphical widgets to make it easier for the newbie, but that doesn't mean you have to use them.

let me clarify why i use Redhat. look, RPM is a common package type. if i'm looking for a good program for something, i can download this RPM and that RPM and install everything quickly. check it out, then unRPM it if it isn't what i'm looking for. no problem.
with Debian, if the package isn't in apt's repository, then you have to compile it, only to find the package is crap and you remove it anyway.

poeple please tell me: other than a great package manager, what other positives are there to Debian?
and wouldn't you consider Gentoo more for the export user than Debian? why is Debian better than Gentoo?

so far, i can count the Debian negatives:
1. outdated everything
2. package type not popular
3. cludgy installer
4. not great support (ximian?)

sure, Redhat is geared towards newbies: but you don't have to use the newbie tools to configure it. every single config i make to Redhat machines are with vi.

again i ask, besides a great package manager, what else can Debian offer me?

debian in a redhat shop

[Soothh]

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...

Good way to try Debian

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Good way to try Debian

[Bronster]

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.

Tell me about it - I just downloaded the latest testing official installer CD, and the thing is absolutely shocking - much worse user interface than even the Woody installer. It writes (default) at the end of the command which it's currently expecting to run, which takes ages to find amongst 20 lines with random lengths and various text in them if you're not familiar with it. It has broken components all over the place, and it doesn't have any design coherency. Half the options aren't cleanly back-out-ofable, and it's still inefficient with bandwidth for a console-only setup.

There really isn't much going for the current installer - I hope someone brings out a better one soon - I'm almost tempted to play with it myself (I might also be bitter because it doesn't have the rtl8139 driver, thought the 8139too driver is on there and works fine - but every single time you do anything it prompts with "couldn't find required driver". Grr)

I'm going to go get Knoppix now!

Re:Good way to try Debian

[Zigg]

FWIW, the idea of the new installer is that it'll come with a bunch of frontends, much like debconf does today. You probably won't be dealing with the admittedly ugly text installer.

Re:Good way to try Debian

[greenguy]

I quite agree. I really don't see what the big deal about installing Debian is - get Knoppix and use the hdinstall script. I'm far from a hard-core techie, and I've done this twice with no help.

I started with Knoppix, switched to Mandrake, switched again to RH, and am now back to Knoppix. The reason is simply that Knoppix is what I want from Linux: choice and configurability. The whole stability thing is a plus, too; it's why I switched away from RH.

Re:Good way to try Debian

[rsheridan6]

With Knoppix, you go into a rootshell and type "knx-hdinstall" and it installs it for you.. you have to know how to partition a drive with ncurses and a few other things that are fairly basic but might daunt a total newbie. Far, far easier than the official debian install, though. If you could even dream of successfully installing debian the normal way, with Knoppix it'll be a snap.

The only problem with it is that it puts the home directory on the root partition, and automatically configures the user as "knoppix". A mild annoyance. Still the best solution I've found, after trying RedHat, Mandrake, Slackware, and Debian Woody.

So what?

[rknop]

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

Re:So what?

[latroM]

Debian isn't a "linux distribution", it is kernel independent operating system. They have ports for netbsd, the Hurd and linux kernels. And the name of the whole operating system is GNU/Linux.

Re:Apt-get

[Squarewav]

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

print url

[millette]

This seems to work a little faster: http://www.linmagau.org/modules.php?op=modload&nam e=Sections&file=index&req=printpage&artid= 212

up2date vs apt

[mapnjd]

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.

Re:up2date vs apt

[Alkarismi]

There are a few of us who also operate in the 'real world' who may not quite share your view ;)

I am by no means a Debian 'bigot', I don't us it as my personal desktop for instance, but I strongly assert it has a place, not least in the enterprise, an area we're no slouches in ourselves 8^)

I'm glad you like using Red Hat. I find your experience of the superiority of up2date over apt interesting, but not really backed up by my own experience.

In my experience, 'enterprise customers' are more least as likely to go the Debian route, of course, ymmv but it is in no way as cut and dried as you seem to assert.

Debian and other distros

[zr-rifle]

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.

Re:Debian and other distros

[Moraelin]

Please don't take it as some offence, but you seem confuse two very different issues there.

Yes, Windows does insist on doing the non-neighbourly thing and do whatever it damn pleases, like it's the boss. It's done so all the time. One of the things which put me off as early as Win'95 was that it insisted to auto-detect something completely wrong, in spite of my best efforts to tell it not to.

Yes, I too would like some more control over what happens on _my_ computer. Bill Gates has his own computer(s), he doesn't need to completely take over mine, thank you very much.

_However_, I fail to see how that means that user-UNfriendly is the way to go. Yes, you can still edit your own config files, and noone will replace them with a Windows-style registry. But why is it bad if Random J User can configure the same things via a comfortable GUI?

Some people seem to have this elitist attitude that "Hey, we're the only ones who matter, because we can chain 10 obscure shell commands via pipes, to achieve some trivial result. All you point-and-drool GUI users suck and should go away."

And it's _precisely_ this kind of attitude which has kept Linux off the desktop so far.

When Mr Oldtimer Guru wants to demonstrate Linux to his pal Random J User, or help Random J User configure his freshly installed Linux distro... guess what happens? Let's say it's something as easy as helping Random J User configure his ISDN connection.

The knowledgeable Mr Oldtimer Guru starts grepping around and editing arcane config files in emacs or vi. All while his pal Random J User is getting this frightening impression that the _only_ way is to go through all that nightmare. Because for Random J User, with zero Unix knowledge, it _is_ a nightmare to just look at all that. He's already getting the creeps at the mere thought of trying to remember that the next time he needs to change something.

That is already assuming that Mr Oldtimer Guru isn't elitist too. We're assuming here that he's a nice guy, but as it happens, just a too firm believer in the command line and vi. He wouldn't even _consider_ using a nice GUI there, just because, you know, GUIs are just for those clueless Windows wimps.

Whereas if Mr Oldtimer Guru remembered that it's all for the benefit of a NON-technical person, and used one of the nice GUIs available for configuring an ISDN connection in Linux, _then_ Random J User might have felt less threatened. Maybe Random J User wouldn't then proceed to uninstall Linux and swear never to touch it again.

So basically yeah, user-unfriendly != survivability. And it's a good thing, too. The whole "unfriendly == good" or "unfriendly == the proper Unix way" philosophy is doing far more harm to Linux than Microsoft ever did.

Re:Debian and other distros

[RealisticWeb.com]

I think you are touching on an important point here that a lot of people miss. We all know that one of the big reasons that personal computers running DOS became so popular was the ability to twiddle with the hardware yourself. Part of the whole experience has always been being able to go down to the local hardware store and buy an upgrade card/chip/disk and fiddle with it till it worked. It is frustrating a lot of times and you might cuss a bit but overall it is fun to do. The part that we forget about is that the other half of the fun was that the OS itself was a tinker tool! I spent a lot of time back in the day doing thinks like customizing my prompt, tweaking my memory management, and writing batch files to simplify tasks. This was all before linux or the Internet existed, and since being a kid I didn't have access to any UNIX machine, this was all I had. As time went on and MS continued to release their products, I found more and more of my control over the system being taken away from me. I could still play with the hardware but MS was doing everything it could to maintain complete control over how things worked on my machine and giving me "permission denied" errors. Permission denied?! It's my computer! At about the time of Windows 98 I had finally got sick of loosing control and started looking for an alternative. That is when I discovered Linux. I found to my amazement that not only was there an OS that gave me COMPLETE control over my machine, but that it was totally free! It was very liberating! My love of tinkering had early on led me to an interest in programming, so I had become quite good at QBASIC since that was the only thing available to me in DOS. Now with Linux I found an amazing collection of development tools, and along with the help of the newly formed internet to get my questions answered I grew up to be a professional developer.

My point is, "user friendly" isn't always a good thing, and it doesn't appeal to all people. In fact I see many Linux distros making the same mistake as MS in this area. The key is increasing "ease-of-use" while maintaining "user-control". This is why I love Debian. If you are a Linux noob, just the very act of installing it will make you learn more about your computer. Why is this bad? The end user isn't nearly as stupid as most people assume (and yes I have done help desk support). The problem is that people are trained to be stupid. They are milked along and so protected from icky-computer stuff that they don't let themselves believe that they can do anything with their computer unless it is all taken care of for them. Even if they are smart people! Of course there are certain things that need explaining to noobs such as "what is this hda1 stuff?" and how to use the man pages, but if you actually let people figure things out, it is amazing how much they will learn.

I say Debian shouldn't change a thing. And if they take my advice, they may not ever be at the top of the market share, but the user base will never dry up. As more and more Linux flavors make the same mistakes as Windows has, right down to the poor UI, more and more people will turn to TRUE GNU/Linux.

Re:Is the article really focusing on Debian

[Erwos]

"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)"

1. Several high-quality fonts were released into the open not too long ago by their corporate creators.
2. XRandR
3. Easy configuration? Have you used a modern version of RedHat or SuSE? It really couldn't be too much easier...
4. The LSB is the common base.

Anything else?

-Erwos

Quit drooling over apt-get

[DaStoned]

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.

Re:Quit drooling over apt-get

[jonoxer]

Calling APT the main and only advantage of Debian is plain ignorance

Umm, I didn't. In fact I specifically said that Debian is not a one-idea project. It's just that Apt is the most obvious feature to most people who aren't as aware of equally (IMHO) important issues as amazingly broad multi-platform support, strict adherence to an Open Source-only policy, or the outstanding work of the security team to backport fixes. Maybe as maintainer of apt-cacher I focused too much on Apt, but what prompted me to write it in the first place was the requests from Red Hat users for assistance with getting apt-cacher running on their RH boxes.

And I think there is *nothing* wrong with that, I'm really glad to have been able to help them, it's just something that started off the train of thought that ended with that article. Hence the Apt focus.

Re:Quit drooling over apt-get

[esper]

Go ahead, port it to Apple, the users will only benefit from it.

Already been done. Fink is what made my OSX box usable.

corporates have always been strange...

[Anonymous Coward]

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 safe whilst it sticks to its heritage!

[Alkarismi]

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.

APT is NOT the "big advantage" of Debian

[WanderingGhost]

Well, it's sad that people say that now that apt has been ported to other distributions, Debian has no advantages anymore. The development process in Debian is the real advantage, with some nice consequences:

• Eleven hardware architectures supported.
• Support for other kernels (Hurd and BSD) is almost there (experimental versions do work already).
• A solid and intelligent policy, which will yield uniformness among packages, their directories and configuration files, etc, besides other nice things.
• An excellent bug-tracking system.
• More software than any other Linux distribution.
• Respect for upstream software (like, Debian doesn't call Apache "httpd", they call it "apache").
• Usually, there are scripts to automate everything: compare kernel compilation in RedHat to kernel compilation in Debian, for example.
• Stability. Debian is famous for not releasing buggy software, no matter how long it takes to release.
• Respect for suggestions and request from users: Debian will listen to users (via the bug tracking system), and if what you say makes sense, it will be included. No marketing department will filter anything.

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).

Re:APT is NOT the "big advantage" of Debian

[WanderingGhost]

Oh. I forgot: upgrade between major versions, without the need to reinstall. You can upgrade a server from 2.x to 3.0 with APT.

Re:APT is NOT the "big advantage" of Debian

[jonoxer]

Well, it's sad that people say that now that apt has been ported to other distributions, Debian has no advantages anymore

It wasn't at all my intention to give that impression, sorry if I wasn't explicit enough. The point I was making is that there are *lots* more good things about Debian than Apt, just that Apt is the most obvious one (and the one most people are aware of).

Re:APT is NOT the "big advantage" of Debian

[WanderingGhost]

It wasn't at all my intention to give that impression, sorry if I wasn't explicit enough. The point I was making is that there are *lots* more good things about Debian than Apt, just that Apt is the most obvious one (and the one most people are aware of).

Yes, no problem :-)
I think the Debian people should perhaps include all those points when they advocate.

Re:APT is NOT the "big advantage" of Debian

[darkcompanion]

I've been using APT for Conectiva, and I can tell you it's really not as good as the original.

I had a chance to run apt-rpm on Redhat, and found it quite resource hungry too : the machine had 64 Meg ram (no swap), but would not let me do the upgrade from RH 7.1 to 7.2. I have used apt on Debian for years on a machine with 12 Meg ram and 32 Meg swap, without any problems.

Re:APT is NOT the "big advantage" of Debian

[MSG]

Respect for upstream software (like, Debian doesn't call Apache "httpd", they call it "apache").

You're obviously referring to httpd in recent Red Hat Linux distributions. Someone should have mentioned to you that the Apache Software Foundation renamed the project when they released Apache httpd 2.0. You can probably learn more on http://httpd.apache.org/

Re:APT is NOT the "big advantage" of Debian

[WanderingGhost]

Someone should have mentioned to you that the Apache Software Foundation renamed the project when they released Apache httpd 2.0.

Sure, but they should respect the *other* web servers. Apache is not the only one. They could call it "apache-httpd", then... But then comes another advantage of Debian: you *can* choose between different web servers. :-)

Re:APT is NOT the "big advantage" of Debian

[WanderingGhost]

First you blame Debian for not respecting upstream, then you (implicitly) blame them for respecting the upstream - whom you then blame.

Er... I didn't blame Debian for not respecting upstream. I said the Debian people *do* respect upstream, and that RedHat did not in this case. But I agree, this may have been something else but disrespect after all...

Re:APT is NOT the "big advantage" of Debian

[edbarrett]

Respect for upstream software (like, Debian doesn't call Apache "httpd", they call it "apache")

Hans Reiser would disagree with you, but then I'd disagree with him, so it would be even. Follow the thread, it's almost as much fun as de Raadt vs. Bernstein.

Re:APT is NOT the "big advantage" of Debian

[WanderingGhost]

Hans Reiser would disagree with you,

Oh, that was, IMHO, a huge misunderstanding! Anyway, it looks like the problem has been settled alrady. Anyway -- that shows that the Debian developers do listen to upstream authors, and that they do try to sort ou tproblems! :-)

Death of Debian predicted, film at 11

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

In the Tradition of Greenspun's Tenth

[Adam Warner]

``Any sufficiently complicated software distribution contains an ad hoc, informally specified bug-ridden implementation of half of Debian GNU/Linux.''

Knoppix

[kronsrepus]

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.

Re:Knoppix

[kronsrepus]

For gnome 1.4 at the boot prompt type desktop=gnome or something.

Its also got icewm on there too.

Re:Knoppix

[UserGoogol]

They took that out in version 3.2 because "GNOME is stupid." Knoppix 3.1 can't be too bad, though. (And being 3.1 allows you to make any number of cheesy Windows 3.1 jokes, like how Knoppix 95 should be coming out soon or something.)

Re:Knoppix

[rsheridan6]

There's a Knoppix spin-off called Morphix, hosted at sourceforge, which comes in several flavors, including a Gnome version. I can't vouch for it personally, but it may be what you're asking for.

debian is not just apt and a philosophy

[bazongis]

Here is why I am likely to stick to debian in the foreseeable future:

• it's not because of the philosophy (I love the philosophy, but it wouldn't keep me from switching to a better distro if that makes my life in front of the computer better)
• it's not just because of apt
• it's because the packages have an extremely high quality, and because of a long term hassle-free upgrade procedure

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 :-)

Re:debian is not just apt and a philosophy

[Anonymous Coward]

I started using debian roughly 4 years ago...Since then I have been running exactly the same debian installation.

Whats your IP address?

Re:debian is not just apt and a philosophy

[Alkarismi]

Bang on the money!

I have exactly the same experience as you on countless systems! One of my machines at home (currently used by my son) has been through many incarnations of Debian!

More than this, my company manages hundreds of Debian boxes that have been through this chain-of-reincarnation scenario and all are, without exception, working flawlessly.

Thanks for writing :-)

Re:debian is not just apt and a philosophy

[Nothinman]

Exactly.

Re:debian is not just apt and a philosophy

[Zigg]

You're trying to be clever, I know, but you're failing miserably. The grandparent's point was that his system has smoothly upgraded without needing to be reinstalled throughout those four years.

I have the same experience with my laptop.

Re:debian is not just apt and a philosophy

[sevensharpnine]

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.

Don't use your friends' lack of technical knowledge to compare every non-Debian distribution to Windows; you've mentioned nothing that can't be done on any reasonably complete Linux distribution. The hassle-free upgrading you praise is becoming a standard part of most distributions, though Debian was clearly the forerunner in this area. I'm glad you've found happiness with Debian, but I would caution you against evangelizing it too hard. Your admitted lack of up-to-date knowledge with other flavors Linux may very well surprise you someday. The rest of the world hasn't stood still.

Re:debian is not just apt and a philosophy

[bazongis]

Don't use your friends' lack of technical knowledge to compare every non-Debian distribution to Windows; you've mentioned nothing that can't be done on any reasonably complete Linux distribution. The hassle-free upgrading you praise is becoming a standard part of most distributions, though Debian was clearly the forerunner in this area. I'm glad you've found happiness with Debian, but I would caution you against evangelizing it too hard. Your admitted lack of up-to-date knowledge with other flavors Linux may very well surprise you someday. The rest of the world hasn't stood still.

It was not intention to 'evangelise', quite the opposite actually. I'm sorry if I conveyed this wrongly.

All of those friends have been using linux for a couple of years and are either computer professionals (system administration or professional programmer), or hobby-programmers that spend a considerable amount of time using their systems and developing on it. I was not talking about linux newbies. That is why I felt their experience was unlikely to be unusual.

I'm glad the rest of the world hasn't stood still, and I really hope that some day all systems will achieve a similar level of 'upgradability' as debian does today, and maybe even surpass it. Maybe some even offer it today. This can only be good for linux-based systems in general.

If someday a superior distribution emerges, I might well switch to it.

Personally, I try to refrain from 'evangelising' about distributions. The power of linux-based systems and open source in general lies in the variety of solutions to choose from, and while I will point out some alternatives to people who ask me about linux distributions, I will also tell them about my personal experience. It's just that - a personal experience.

Re:debian is not just apt and a philosophy

[wine]

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).

And exactly because Debian is so easy to keep up-to-date, the whole discussion about its complex installer is void.

With debian you go through the hassle of installing once, and keep up-to-date for years without any pain.

Re:debian is not just apt and a philosophy

[cpeterso]

I've tried dabbling with Debian a couple times, but always had trouble. Recently, I installed Stable and it gave me a Linux 2.2 kernel. I wanted to upgrade to Linux 2.4, so I followed the Debian kernel upgrade instructions. I was instructed to hand-edit a few files and then after running apt-get and rebooting, my system would refuse to boot the new kernel. :-(

Screw average Joe

[1gor]

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.

Re:Screw average Joe

[DescData]

This attitude is a dead end. I compare what is happening to Linux distributions to what happened to Personal computer in the 80's. There were advocates for several platform, (my closet computer is Atari Falcon), but over time they all moved on. Why?

Being involved with computers is only interesting contributes to something that grows. A growing user base is the sign that you got it right. It's like the audience of a standup comic. When the average guy leaves for something else, your project has truly died.

Debian does not have to die. It just needs to reorient it's self. It needs to become the best at listening, and making everyone a contributer in some way.

Re:Screw average Joe

[peripatetic_bum]

1. I would like hear if this the debian developer's point of view. I have often heard it said by other debian users that debian isnt for the end user. I would someone who actaully develops for debian make thsi clear

2. Who are the influential people?

Thanks!

Re:Screw average Joe

[1gor]

When a user learns to use *nix shell, GNU standard utilities and how to edit a few config files then he/she probably don't need GUI "helper tools" that are great feature of "mainstream" distributions. In fact, these tools become nuisance since they lock user to a particular vendor. You have SuSE 7.3 running on the server and you need to upgrade to PHP4.3 from standard 4.0 No way. The vendor is already selling Suse 8.2 and motivates you to update the whole box. Been there, seen this...

On the contrast Debian, as community effort, is more or less "software for own use". It represents interests of people who *use* software rather than *sell* software. That's why its so conservative with introduction of "GUI helpers" and that is why it pays so much attention to security and manageability. It's users are mostly sysadmins who know what they are doing (know command line, for example). And yes, they are influential as anyone with specialist technical knowledge.

So leave Debian alone, it is distribution for power users and don't even try this political correctness crap. I'm not a Debian developer, they may have different ideas, but as a user I want to keep Debian simple (i.e. complex for ave.Joe).

11 minutes, and already slashdotted

[xdroop]

...pretty amazing.

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.

Re:Debian has the problem the whole Linux world ha

[mpe]

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...)

This is an example of copying a design flaw from Windows. When doing things the "unix way", use /etc/magic and take no notice of the file name, would work far better.

Niche markets have their place too.

[wadiwood]

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.

Re:Niche markets have their place too.

[James_Duncan8181]

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.

Yes. This is an example of where Debian-the-system can do well (preinstalled and modded with a custom GUI). A good thing would be a simple Knoppix-based liveCD with a OEOne style frontend designed for Your Mama(tm). This would fill a market need.

But I would hope you would see that this project would meed to be designed with a considerably different philosophy then Debian-as-distro is at the moment.

Re:Niche markets have their place too.

[Large Green Mallard]

I used Debian on early pentiums for servers.. on Pentium 133mhz runs Samba/LPRNG for a network file/login/print server for 8 client machines, and another P166mhz runs samba/nfs/lprng as a fileserver for 15 machines. Realistically these machines should be thrown out, but they actually work fine in these roles (Tho the P133 is marginal :)

Re:Is the article really focusing on Debian

[Epistax]

hmm make 2004 into 2010, and couple of years into couple of decades, and "at least" with "and the destruction of Washington State".

Joe User and Debian

[Gleef]

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.

Re:Joe User and Debian

[Alkarismi]

I fully concur, and I'd like to back your experience with my own. We've been deploying GNU/Linux and Open Source in the UK for over 5 years now and I hear your story time and time again! always from strong technical people, always from people solving REAL business problems.
You're right, Debian isn't going to be marginalized any time soon.

Re:Joe User and Debian

[Sentry21]

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.

Well said. Debian is the only distro I can trust enough to reboot remotely, and to upgrade things like SSH remotely. I can trust any upgrades I make on my local machine to reflect the upgrades I make on the server later on, because I know that the versions are the same. I know I can test a config change locally and upload it to the server when I upgrade. I know I can test the versions in Unstable on my local network, then be ready for any config changes in Testing when the versions make it there (register_globals anyone?).

A friend of mine, systems administrator, was always trashing Debian. Package management sucks, he said. You don't know what's being installed, he said. It breaks things, he said. Then he got a job at a place in Montreal, which was an all-Debian shop.

Now, it's all he ever uses.

He trusts the package management on Debian (but wouldn't trust RPM). He can see what's being installed when he updates, and mark packages to be held back, if he wants. He can be aware ahead of time (thanks to Testing) of changes that might break configuration issues.

It's taken me a while to get him used to doing things 'The Debian Way' - not compiling from source, and so on - but once I show him how easy it is, he sticks with it. Dependancy management (apt-get build-dep for example) makes life easier when you're custom compiling. It all just works together.

The Red Hat apt-rpm issues remind me a lot of the rpm vs dpkg arguments. Red Hat wanted a package management system, but dpkg wans't ready, said the Debian programmers. So they made their own. And it sucks. It's not backwards compatible, it doesn't do dependancies right (it'll depend on a 'file' (/usr/bin/perl) but not check to see if the file exists; instead, you have to install a package that provides the file). It breaks when you try to upgrade. In short, they made something that does the same thing, but they missed the point. They failed to realize what it was that made the system great.

With apt-rpm, it's the same thing. They saw Debian, and how it all worked flawlessly, and decided to duplicate it. So, they ripped off apt-get (and good for them, I approve). The problem is, they missed the point. They saw the difference on the surface and made a copy, but they didn't get the deeper realities of it - the soul of Debian, not the face of Debian. And that is exactly what's being discussed in the article.

The only problem is, people look at Debian and see the face, and look at Red Hat and see the same face. It's only when you try them that you feel the soul of the projects, but you have to try them both to realize how much difference there really is. That's the problem that Debian has.

--Dan

Wisdom requested to go from RH to Debian

[RickySilk]

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.

Re:Wisdom requested to go from RH to Debian

[juahonen]

If your RedHat installation doesn't give you what you need from a server operating system, it's a good time to think about switching. I would not rush it, since there is always the chance something is screwed and restoring an entire system back is not easily done even if you keep full backups. You should at least familiarize yourself with Debian before you start running servers with it.

The Debian install is not much different from the rest of the distros. If you know how Linux works, the text-based installation progress is quite simple. You can set it up to get packages from the net, so there's no need to burn all the CD's. The Debian web site has links to netinstall ISO images which are only 10-30 MB.

For me Debian install takes about half an hour. You might need considerably more on your first run. But heed this warning: Don't run task-sel nor dselect to pick the apps. I've yet to hear of a successful use of those two utilities. Especially for a server environment, you probably don't want to have all kinds of software lying around (both task-sel and dselect install tons of software you didn't want).

After you have your Debian system configured, it's a simple matter of apt-cache search'ing and apt-get install'ing the software you need. The dependency system will take care of the libraries and softwares to which the software you want depends on. After two hours you should be set up (depending on your network connection speed) with the software you need.

To keep up with security, choose only stable Debian packages. Then it's a simple matter of scripting to set up a cron job to do atp-get update and apt-get dist-upgrade periodically.

You might also want to take a look at Gentoo Linux, which offers similar packaging system to Debian. Gentoo philosophy is that you're provided with the package information and source codes which are compiled on your system for optimal setup; there's no binary distribution. I don't know of their security update model.

And if you're open-minded, there are always the BSDs.

Re:Wisdom requested to go from RH to Debian

[jonoxer]

As far as installation time goes, well, that varies ;-)

One of the earlier articles covers running the basic installer, but you may have trouble getting to it right now since the linmagau server is slashdotted:

http://www.linmagau.org/modules.php?op=modload&nam e=Sections&file=index&req=viewarticle&artid=46&pag e=1

As for time to invest in updating security patches etc, that depends which distro (Stable, Testing, Unstable) you go with. For a server, use Stable. Then as long as you have security.debian.org in your sources.list (the default if you use the Woody installer) and do a regular "apt-get update; apt-get upgrade" you'll be set as far as security patches are concerned.

For Testing and Unstable the situation is slightly more complex, but for a server they are irrelevant unless you start doing things like backporting recent packages - not something you are likely to do until you learn more about Debian.

I'm intending to do a future article on the process Debian use for security patches, advisories etc. It's in my TOC on www.debianuniverse.com anyway ;-)

Re:Wisdom requested to go from RH to Debian

[Alkarismi]

It's always a good time to switch to Debian ;)

Takes about half an hour to install.
Security patches are a breeze, Debian's the best, and yes, apt is your friend.
Yes there are lists, but a simple
deb http://security.debian.org stable/updates main contrib non-free
in your sources.list (assuming you're running stable - which you _will_ be on a server) will be all you need to stay within about 24 hours of the latest updates!

If you're serious about moving, mail me off list and I'll help you through...

Re:Wisdom requested to go from RH to Debian

[RickySilk]

Great info thanks for the reply.

I'm happy with 7.3 but that happiness come from the stability and the ease of updating. I believe I read that it would be at the end of this year 7.3 would no longer be included in RH network which means the ease of updating goes away.

Ironically the first distro I ever attempted to install was Debian from this book it kicked my ass which is when I went to RH 5. Been with RH ever since.

I ran gentoo 1.2 on my desktop for a few months, until I realized it was requiring way to much tinker time. emerge/portage is very nice but I question gentoo's stability.

Re:Wisdom requested to go from RH to Debian

[RickySilk]

Great info, I'll read this once the /. crowd eases up.

I can already tell that the Debian community is strong and helpful, gives me alot of confidence in attempting my first install.

Re:Wisdom requested to go from RH to Debian

[juahonen]

When the update contract expires, you'll have to get a newer version or switch to some other distribution. Redhat is on only offering the much-talked-about one-year upgrade period.

It's long time since RH5 and Debian 2.1. I suggest you take a look at Debian 3.0 (woody); It has improved much since 1998.

If you don't want to leave RPM-based systems, then you'd find SuSE an easy choice. I've used their distribution before I switched to Debian, and I don't have anything against them (save for RPMs). The YAST2 setup tool is really helpful, and you'd benefit from their participation in UnitedLinux and commitment to LSB and FHS.

Re:Wisdom requested to go from RH to Debian

[Cackmobile]

But I thought BSD was dying!!!!

Re:Is the article really focusing on Debian

[cbcbcb]

RedHat 8's GUI config tools are abysmal. They are badly organised and have (in places) pretty poor UI design. Having said that, Windows control panel is only slightly better.

Watch out for what?

[SunPin]

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.

Re:Watch out for what?

[turgid]

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.
The IBM PC was never an open infrastructure. It was closed, however this is a common misconception nowadays. What actually happened is that people reverse-engineered the PC, documented it, and did a "clean-room" reimplementation to avoid litigation ie the implementors were not part of the reverse-engineering teams. This was especially important for the ROM BIOS of the PC which was essential for writing any sort of software in those days since MS-DOS was so limited (ie you gad to speak straigh to the BIOS). So if you didn't have an IBM-compatible BIOS you weren't "PC Compatible". You may have been able to run a port of MS-DOS though.
This was also one of the reasons it took so long for "real" operating systems to take of on PCs. The BIOS only worked in Real Mode and hardware was so disparate and open source hadn't been invented, so no one got around to writing a Protected Mode (32-bit) OS for a long time...

Re:Debian is a Dinosaur

[Alkarismi]

You're considering the issue ONLY from your perspective as a desktop user! Take a look at how much businesses spend on their server-side compared with the desktop and you'll see that the server is where it's at! The spend on the desktop is going to go WAYYYYYYYYYYY down and GNU/Linux will play its part in this.
You are correct that Debian has proved itself on servers, that is why there will always be a place for it whilst it sticks to its heritage.
If you really like portage that much you should try FreeBSD btw, it kicks your portage into touch ;)

Obviously, he means marketing

[twilight30]

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 .

"I love Debian, but ..."

[Xouba]

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 :-)

Re:"I love Debian, but ..."

[dTb]

I love Debian as well (we migrated to it from Red Hat for all our servers) but it seems that Red Hat are now developing up2date across releases: If you have a copy of Red Hat 9, type "up2date --help" and look at the second to last option:

(--upgrade-to-release= Upgrade to the channel specified)

I can't test this as there is no Red Hat 10 yet but it certainly seems as if Red Hat are trying to fill in their weaknesses.

Re:"I love Debian, but ..."

[chill]

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). ...

Okay, I'll say it. I don't use nor recommend Debian. Nor do I consider it superior. Sorry.

Why? Debian is a religion, not an Operating System. (Okay, GNU/Debian-Linux...whatever.)

The original article was talking a great deal about Linux for "Joe User" and on the desktop.
Joe User is NOT interested in debates over licenses, nor the relative merits of FOSS vs Closed-Source, not 90% of anything else that is discussed on Slashdot.

Joe User is interested in getting their work/play done. All their friends have MP3, their DVD/CD player plays MP3 disks and the little gizmos sold at WalMart play MP3. They DO NOT CARE about the license or that it isn't "free". They DO NOT CARE about ogg-vorbis. They want to play their music and have no problem PAYING FOR THE LICENSE for the MP3 format. The bought the CD/DVD player, the RIO and (sometimes) the CD.

Joe User wants to PLAY THEIR DVD without a crapload of hacks to get around licensing CSS. They DO NOT CARE about the politics or the license fee.

Joe User wants to be able to edit/create Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Project, Publisher and Visio files. NOT understand the merits of "closed" vs "open" formats. They need to pay the bills, and if they work in an office that usually means MS Office file formats.

Repeat after me: "The computer is a TOOL, not a way of life. The operating system is a TOOL, not a religion."

Back to the beginning -- why I neither use nor recommend Debian. Because I'm not interested in making excuses for lack of perceived functionality to people who just want to do their work or play a game.

If it is Linux, for a non-geek, it is Red Hat or SuSE. Most non-geeks DO NOT WANT TO BECOME geeks, which is what they will have to do to appreciate Debian.

Re:"I love Debian, but ..."

[Aliencow]

I've been using Gentoo since pre 1.0 days.. I love it, but until recently I wouldn't consider using it on a commercial server simply because recompiling SSH or Apache or whatever because of security updates might just be a bit too long.. With Debian it'd be pretty fast..

Re:"I love Debian, but ..."

[BlueWonder]

The computer is a TOOL, not a way of life. The operating system is a TOOL, not a religion.

I strongly disagree. Technology should always be evaluated in a social/ethical context. Cars are not only a means of transportation, they also pollute the air. Nuclear fission can be used to produce energy or to kill a lot of people...

Re:"I love Debian, but ..."

[rmohr02]

[T]he "I love Debian, but I use because " is quite standard. Usually 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 know a lot about computers, and Debian is still hard to install. That is, I can install it, but I don't know how to set up X, it's a pain to install everything I need (though apt helps a lot with that).

Right now, I use Libranet--it's not free as in beer, but it's mostly free as in speech, and it acts like Debian (except possibly for 'apt-get dist-upgrade').

Re:"I love Debian, but ..."

[esper]

Most non-geeks DO NOT WANT TO BECOME geeks, which is what they will have to do to appreciate Debian.

Funny, most of the non-geeks that I've set Debian up for appreciate it because it doesn't make them become geeks to use it. Once Debian is installed, ongoing maintenance is dead easy, allowing non-geeks to focus on using the system instead of trying to understand its guts.

Re:newby question

[drunk_as_in_beer]

debe-ian or debb-ian? TIA

Debb-ian as in Debbie or Deborah.

The guy who started Debian named it after his wife Deborah...

Re:Debian is a Dinosaur

[MrPink2U]

Debian will remain my first choice for a server distro for its stability and for ease of maintenance (at least for me).

While I agree with your statement that Debian will never take over the desktop market, I disagree with the statement regarding Gentoo. Gentoo is a little too techie for Jane/Joe user. Gentoo's installation procedure is no piece of cake if you aren't an experienced Linux/Unix user. chroot, mke2fs, fdisk, etc. aren't tools that I could see any of my non-IT friends undertaking.

Please don't take this as a Gentoo flame. I think it is a fun distro with a lot of up to date packages. It's just that with today's hardware I really don't see the need to tailor my software for my architecture. The performance gains aren't worth waiting for the compiles to finish.

Remember Corel Linux?

[VernonNemitz]

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?

Re:Remember Corel Linux?

[expro]

Because they are fools with an attention span of a couple of months when it comes to visions that take quite a few years, and an expert at Corel who is an old-timer is one who has been with them for three years rather than the normal 6 months. They are also laying off, again, as we speak, caches of non-temporary workers that had clung on a bit too long for their liking.

Useability

[stephenpeters]

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

Debian is Multi-Headed Dragon

[Vitus Wagner]

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

Re:Debian is Multi-Headed Dragon

[Alkarismi]

Dude, with you on that one ;)

Debian is not APT - it is the maintainers

[brunes69]

The thing that makes APT, and in turn Debian, work so well is not thearch itself, but the people who maintain it. I myself have used apt-rpm on Redhat about a month ago, and within 2 hours of installing it it had fully hosed my system, downloading and installing conflicting packages or somesuch when I tried to do a dist upgrade. Nothing like that has ever happened to me in the 2 years of using debian and updating daily.

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.

Re:Debian has the problem the whole Linux world ha

[Turmio]

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)?

IBM PC open ! think again

[DrSkwid]

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.

Why Joe User Doesnt Like Debian

[nurb432]

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.....

iTunes

[stephenpeters]

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.

Joe user will dump Linux anyway ..

[Mr_Silver]

... if his experience with WinModems is anything like mine.

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.

Re:Joe user will dump Linux anyway ..

[/dev/trash]

A solution? Buy a real modem.

Re:Joe user will dump Linux anyway ..

[Mr_Silver]

A solution? Buy a real modem.

1. The vast majority of modems on the market these days are winmodems. They are everywhere.
2. Real modems are often double to three times more expensive and (to the end user) do exactly the same as a WinModem. Therefore they are seen as a rip-off.
3. Telling someone that they have to go purchase something else to replace an item that already works perfectly is hardly going to encourage people to switch.

Sure, it's a solution - but not a very good one.

Re:Joe user will dump Linux anyway ..

[Ars-Fartsica]

The vast majority of modems on the market these days are winmodems. They are everywhere.

No, WinModems died out fairly rapidly for obvious reasons.

Real modems are often double to three times more expensive and (to the end user) do exactly the same as a WinModem.

No. Real modems work. WinModems don't. Spend the $20 to upgrade.

Re:Joe user will dump Linux anyway ..

[Mr_Silver]

No, WinModems died out fairly rapidly for obvious reasons.

I can't talk for America, but here in the UK it's practically impossible to get a non-winmodem these days.

Also, how did WinModems die out for "obvious reasons"? It obviously wasn't because they worked and were cheaper than normal modems and I seriously doubt that it had anything to do with Linux. WinModems are alive and kicking down at your local PC store.

No. Real modems work. WinModems don't. Spend the $20 to upgrade.

WinModems work just fine. On Windows machines. Why should Joe Bloggs spend $20 extra for something that, to him, gives him exactly no additional benifit.

You're correct to say that WinModems don't work because they require software to replace the missing hardware - but to imply they "don't work" is flat out wrong.

Re:Joe user will dump Linux anyway ..

[pe1chl]

>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?

How long until telephone modem support is just as low a priority as floppy support?

The floppy driver has been terrible for many years now, and nobody seems to care. Who uses floppies anyway?

I think it will go the same way with modems.

Re:Joe user will dump Linux anyway ..

[Wolfrider]

--The (B)right thing to do, would be to get away from Winmodems entirely, and use a regular hardware modem. Or DSL/broadband.

--And especially get the hell off of Hotmail and onto something that makes sense and protects you from spam - like Yahoo. :P

Re:Joe user will dump Linux anyway ..

[Ziviyr]

1. Evil bacteria and viruses are everywhere too. I don't want to bother with them either.

2. If they did the same it wouldn't be an issue. Hunt the driver is a game I'm tired of, and its not very effective in a non-windows environment.

3. If it worked perfectly it would work without needing to munch on the CPU.

My solution was DSL with an old 28.8 backup. It works really well.

Re:Joe user will dump Linux anyway ..

[Mr_Silver]

I have a IBM thinkpad with a winmodem running debian, never had any problems with it. Heck I've even got the infrared port running.

How did you manage it? I've got a Thinkpad T21 (I think, could be a T25) and Redhat 9 and it completely fails to find the modem. I don't care too much about IR but getting net access would mean I don't have to keep shifting into Win2k to download something.

kernels

[Khopesh]

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.

Re:kernels

[WanderingGhost]

hope debian does some work on OpenBSD or attempts reaching its security reputation.

I think the work on OpenBSD is a little slow, but check the ports section on the website, the NetBSD port is already running -- it does nto have an installer, and there are few packages ported, but the Debian/BSD team has been reasonably active recently. (Check the debian-bsd and the debian-ports mailing lists).

Re:kernels

[sevensharpnine]

[...] which will attract the more technical users when they abandon linux
as too mainstream [...]

And exactly what is wrong with "mainstream" software? If you're picking your OS based on l33t obscurity, stay the hell out of the discussion. Technical merit and licensing are far more important than bragging rights on irc.

Re:kernels

[Khopesh]

you misquoted me.

i very purposefully outlined why mainstream was bad in the same sentence:
too mainstream, monolithic, and bogged down by politics.

my first comma there might have been better suited as a semi-colon.

if i was picking my OS based on "l33t obscurity," i would already be running hurd.

why debian will succeed

[linuxislandsucks]

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..

Corprate Desktop or your Grandmother's Computer?

[dieman]

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'.

Linux downfall not long behind

[DrSkwid]

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

Re:Linux downfall not long behind

[ddimas]

Probably the Hurd if Stallman ever gets it up to version 1.0.

Wow, Deja Vu...

[StressGuy]

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.

Re:Wow, Deja Vu...

[legojenn]

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?).

It's here. As far as I can tell, it is going strong. Slack9.0 was released in March and is as modern as any other GNU/Linux distro.

Re:Is Debian for everyone? - my anecdote

[j3b]

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.

Elegance and Simplicity

[shplorb]

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.

Nearly followed that

[wadiwood]

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

Re:Nearly followed that

[BrokenHalo]

I got my fingers burnt about 7 years ago trying to get Linux working on a motherboard with integrated sound and graphics. It was a damn nightmare. The best thing that could happen to me did: the damn mobo blew up, and I had a good reason to go out and buy separate components that are known to work.

Just Switched from Debian to Red Hat

[Knight2K]

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.

Re:Just Switched from Debian to Red Hat

[Minna Kirai]

allow graphical apps running as root to display without any thought

That's something of a security hole. Any other program on that X11 display can sniff or modify your root-priviledge program.

Of course, that's not a major threat... running "su" is nearly as bad. Both create a small chance of escalating a compromised user-password into a root exploit.

(Also, there are multiple kinds of X11 access authority- one of them allows programs to display their own data, but not inspect other windows. This would help mitigate risk, if RedHat uses it. I haven't checked.)

Re:Just Switched from Debian to Red Hat

[Knight2K]

Hmm.. that is a good point... I figured there was a reason Debian didn't allow this by default, but it is a major pain in the butt when you want to run graphical configuration tools from a regular user shell. Seems like both Debian and Red Hat should be setup to use the options you mention. Perhaps the kde's graphical su takes care of that case.

Former RedHat user

[mofochickamo]

I started using GNU/Linux with RedHat 5. I used RedHat at work and home through RedHat release 8. I like RedHat. It's easy to install and use. But the distro size keeps growing. I have DSL and no CD burner, so it is a pain to download 3 ISOs and get them burned.

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.

example of the marketing problem

[brlewis]

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.

unix on old pentiums

[wadiwood]

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?

Re:unix on old pentiums

[Large Green Mallard]

I also have a Pentium 133 running NT Server as a Symantec Ghost Image Server with a 40 and a 120GB HDD in it :> I know it's not Linux, and the thruput on the drives ain't great, but it still stands up day after day. Had to get a hacked BIOS from some crazy russian :) It's also in the same little desktop case it was when it was a lab machine back in 1998 with only a 1.2GB HDD.

Re:Debian has the problem the whole Linux world ha

[drew]

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...

LINUX, Desktop Juggernaut

[yo5oy]

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.

Re:Debian has the problem the whole Linux world ha

[Rich]

> 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.

Re:Debian has the problem the whole Linux world ha

[devnull17]

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.

Stealing is good!

[siskbc]

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.

Duh.

[Kingpin]

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.

One good one....

[blixel]

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.

If I 'have' been a fan of Debian???

[Qbertino]

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.

deja vu

[illsorted]

I thought this looked familiar:

Exhibit A

Re:Apt-get is not the ultimate.

[Vanieter]

That would be nice to know what the so-called bugs are - outside of "normal" bugs (after all, APT is still not officially approved for production use). But what about "without a properly working dpkg in the background there is not that much fun." DPKG has never broken on my box. Period.

Is that possible the bugs you're describing are not bugs in APT itself but rather dependency problems in the binary packages ? I've used APT for a year and those are the only problems I've ever had, and every distribution is prone to have them.

Re:Debian has the problem the whole Linux world ha

[Abcd1234]

Not to mention support for a full alpha channel, which is all but a requirement for decent icons these days...

How about rpm and apt-get for Cygwin, RedHat.

[expro]

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.

Nice and easy (was: Re:Duh.)

[albin]

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.

Debian is *free as in beer*

[po8]

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."

Re:Debian is *free as in beer*

[Minna Kirai]

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.

That ended in May 2001, right? Is it actually bothersome to download an ISO anymore?

If for some reason your network can't pull down 2100 megabytes overnight, then just ask a friend with a cablemodem to send you some disks. The friendless can even order those CDs online, for between $2-3 per disk.

The tricky part is that "Red Hat" is a trademark, and the company has stopped ISO resellers from putting that label on their wares. To buy cheap R3dH@t discs, try CheapBytes or Edmunds. Or many others.

Whats so hard about the debian installer?

[fishynet]

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.

Lindows is built on Debian...

[Newer Guy]

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.

WinModem dead even in Windows world

[Ars-Fartsica]

Your argument might have held water for the brief three month period a few years agao when both modem users were in the majority and WinModems were the preferred solution.

Now I say spend the twenty dollars for supported hardware. If you can pay your utility bill this should not be a problem.

Re:WinModem dead even in Windows world

[Cro Magnon]

When did they die? I haven't paid close attention, since I've had CableModem for years, but for quite awhile (a lot longer than 3 months) LoseModems were everywhere! And "real" modems cost a whole lot more than $20!

Elitist is putting it politely

[devphil]

(Disclaimer: I run Debian stable at work, and Debian unstable at home.)

This is a self-fullfilling prophecy, and to change this will take quite a major change from the existing Debian (fairly elitist) culture.

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)

Re:Elitist is putting it politely

[ledestin]

I asked and got help there. While there are always morons out there it is possible that it is your attitude that creates problems for you.

At least make sure you've read smart questions FAQ

Re:Elitist is putting it politely

[devphil]

You missed the part where I said I was one of the people trying to answer questions, not ask them...

Isn't That What XandrOS is?

[frater_corvus]

I can't find any additional information on the website, but I thought that XandrOS [ www.xandros.com ] was the successor to Corel Linux?

Juggernaut?

[cmacb]

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.

But of course!

[Sfing_ter]

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

Re:But of course!

[nutznboltz]

Yes, with Knoppix being based on Debian any fool run a Debian in minutes. Just boot the CD-ROM and there you are running Debian.

Installation is not that much more complicated. Tuning your system is...well can't have everything.

Why I (mostly) use Debian

[Chad Page]

- 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.

The IBM PC was never an open infrastructure?

[BattyMan]

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.

Re:The IBM PC was never an open infrastructure?

[turgid]

because 32-bit protected mode hardware wasn't available until the 80386 was released.
Which came out in 1985 if I am not mistaken. I remember the first 386 PCs in about 1987? Initially they ran at 14.6MHz (they were intended to run at 16MHz).
Like I said though, backwards compatability with old DOS apps (and having to use the BIOS) are what held back proper OSs. Oh well, maybe my memory has rotted away since then.

The Problem with Red Hat

[duck_prime]

What's wrong with RH? It's made the most headway in developing a true alternative to M$.

That's exactly the problem... it has become popular enough that it has lost its edgy geek cachet. It's like a new indie band: by the time you've heard of it, it's no longer avant-garde. "Bob, did you hear about that new band?" "Yeah, they were cool till they got together."

Compare Debian stable to Red Hat Advanced Server 2

[griswld]

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.

Re:newby question

[strmcrw]

from the Debian FAQ :

The project name is pronounced Deb'-ee-en, with a short e in Deb, and emphasis on the first syllable. This word is a contraction of the names of Debra and Ian Murdock, who founded the project. (Dictionaries seem to offer some ambiguity in the pronunciation of Ian (!), but Ian prefers ee'-en.)

My top reasons for using Debian

[echo]

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.

Re:My top reasons for using Debian

[Little Brother]

The focus of the article in question is why Joe User would want to use Debian. Therefore I'm responding to this post as though the title was "Joe User's" top reasons for using Debian. I realize you were giving your personal resons, but it is still relavant to see how well these reasons apply to Joe User.

1)Stability. Good stability is important for just about every application you could put a computer to. Let's definantly focus on this one.
2)Joe User doesn't care, why should he?
3)This is not an advantage, it is a disadvantage. Joe User wants to set up a system that works well, fairly easily, even if Joe is fairly advanced, unless he has already used linux a fair amount he won't know if it is better to use foo1.2 sprocket adapter or bar4.9 sprocket adapter. He might go for bar4.9 because its version number is higher, thinking that makes it a more advanced or more stable program (he might be surprized) or, worse he might choose foo1.2 simply because he likes the name better without knowing which software package that does the same thing works better. For Joe User, the best setup is to have one package for one task.
4. No, No, No, No, Joe user doesn't care about the philosophy behind the programmer who wrote the code on his computer. He cares how well it works. If a Non-Free package (esp one that is free as in free-beer) is available he won't like that some high-minded programmer decided he shouldn't have it and leave it out of the distro.

Conclusion, Debian's strong point for Joe User seems to be stability.

We're all dying, man.

[UserGoogol]

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>

Knoppix is why Debian is better than RedHate.

[nutznboltz]

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.

Go.

15, Knoppix 14, Knoppix! 13, KNOPPIX! ... Time's up.

Re:Is the article really focusing on Debian

[Epistax]

Like a cancer you must sacrifice the possibly infected.

Targeting clever people...

[Loopy]

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.

Re:Targeting clever people...

[Vitus Wagner]

It Does matter. What you get after
your hands-free installation? Average system
tuned for somebody else's preferences.

You'll need to hack around long time before
this system would suit your needs.

With debian you are getting what you want
just after install. Of course it involves some
time to explain apt what you really want.

You'll quicky get time, spent for installation
back due to efficiency of everyday work and
simplified upgrades.

problem with png

[Xtifr]

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!

Re:Because there is already a standard.

[Pflipp]

XPM is a text-based file format looking a lot like C code. I've never understood why on earth someone would make that a picture file format. I don't believe it supports stuff like translucency, etc.

PNG is a modern picture file format supporting all stuff needed to make modern, fancy raster-based icons, where large icon sizes != large ASCII icon files.

I'd say it's easy to choose.

Re:Knoppix is why Debian is better than RedHat.

[cdn-programmer]

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.

MHO on Debian

[I am tired of coming]

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

Let's not Mandrakify Debian

[ghjm]

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

My Experience Using Debian

[jechonias]

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.

Re:My Experience Using Debian

[jechonias]

Damn, I should have used the preview function just like the warning said, it looks like I used vi to type that dribble out! Sorry about the lack of paragraphs, that's what happens when you paste from ms-word. Talking of pasting, does it work yet in the linux world????

hmm, maybe, the idea is kind of right

[DrSkwid]

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

you're right

[martin-boundary]

I got a little carried away :-) (and actually learned something, too ;-)

Using "preview" is dying.

[UserGoogol]

You don't need to be a Kreskin to figure out that using "preview" is dying.

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.

kudos

[solferino]

nice comment dan

As I see it

[phorm]

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:
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 /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.

Re:newby question

[jonoxer]

The guy who started Debian named it after his wife Deborah...

...and himself (his name is Ian Murdoch) - DebIan.

Re:newby question

[jonoxer]

Oops, Murdock. ;-)

Re:Is Debian for everyone? - my anecdote

[antoinjapan]

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.

hacked bios, might as well axe the pc

[wadiwood]

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.

Re:hacked bios, might as well axe the pc

[Large Green Mallard]

I had(have) several spare identical motherboards, so no worries about fried green bios :)