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Debian: A Brief Retrospective
IanMurdock writes "This weekend, Debian turned 10. To mark the occasion, I've written a retrospective, published at LinuxPlanet. There's also a very nice piece, based in part on my early writings about Debian as well as the retrospective, at internetnews.com."
How about a robust, secure, directory service integrated into the distribution itself? Something that slaps NIS around and isn't vaporware like Ophion. That alone could be a huge killer app that would kelp those of us in corporate environments who want to move to debian as a workstation based solution.
It's kind of surprising to me. About four years ago, I would have said that for the non-commercial distributions, Slackware reigned easily at the top. They had decent integration, fairly acceptable release timing, and their installer was beautifully easy to use. At that time, Debian still had dselect as the primary tool, which was just painful, a problem with reliably functional ISO images for download, but they had a decent package system in the works.
Today, I'm having a hard time justifying keeping my Slackware install in place on my workstation. It's running 8.0, and I've manually updated enough stuff because of the lag in Slackware's development that I doubt an upgrade of sorts would work properly, yet I want the goodies that gnome2 provides, which looks too daunting to build by hand, with all of its assorted libraries and tools. So, at this point, switching to Debian, which I know is going to see active development for quite some time, is a very attractive option.
Debian's usefulness in the last few years gained so much that the aforementioned workstation is only Slackware, or even non-Debian Linux Box in my control.
The end of dselect being a requirement is probably what prompted that, though I still haven't ever had a successful i386 ISO-based install with it, it's been the two-floppies method.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Slightly offtopic, but if you look at the groups here you can see the start of some very interesting technologies being discussed through newsgroups.
It's a shame they seem to tail off around 1995, it would be nice to see some serious newsgroup discussions that occurred during the past seven years... although this lack of serious discussion may coincide with AOL'ers getting newsgroups access.
... I guess
Which of the above packages would have any meaningful use outside of Emacs? What functionality would you lose by not having any of the above? Given that it's an optional package with almost no reverse dependencies, I call your bluff.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
How do you know the source is safe without analyzing the code line by line?
... is that they still do not manage to make installation take less than 5 hours.
If you know tomsrtbt, a rescue disk made (largely) by one person, one wonders why he alone can make PCMCIA support work out of the box while the 1000s of Debian developers are busy discussing if RFCs belong in main or non-free.
Not that there would be a better distribution than Debian, but tat does not mean there's no room for improvement.
In 10 years, couldn't they come up with a better installer? We're talking about a flipping decade here.
If people want commercial applications, then let some other group build
a Debian based distrobution that includes the software they think people
want.
What is so hard to understand?
*sigh* back to work...
I have had it running on my Gateway 333 for a while now, only thing is mp3s skip sporadically, just cuz it is so slow, they skip in Windoze too. I like it, people like to pick on things that are popular just to be "different", I am not ashamed to admit I like Debian. I like the network install idea, so you only install what you want/need, without bloat. It is best done with a tour guide, ie. elder geek (that isn't a dickhead). It works fine for me, I am not on the bleeding edge of technology anyway. Just every once in a while apt-get update, can't remember the proper syntax, but it is that simple. I have a piece of paper that lists what packages I need when I do a clean install. It is pretty small compared to what comes with a lot of linux distros.
I hate sigs.
There a number of reasons why Debian still *is* the superior linux distribution. religion flame war? nope. Just facts.
Asid from Red Hat which is in the business of big honking big Iron servers,
1. Debian is the only other real distrubution that has real server admins relying on it.
2. Developers favor Debian. At first I just found it neat that so many develoers of my favorite apps tended to package for debian, but now it seems that debian is the defactor developer distro. It is stable for developers who want little change or very Unstable ") for those that want the most. I dont think anyother distro seems to based, except again for Red HAt(ie, apps developed only for redhat) Of course, if something is developed for debian only, dont think it can be the case that is is Debian only, I could be wrong but I would liekt o know
3. Community: It is the largest. Bar None. On IRC there might be anywheres of 500 prople logged in. You can count on at least 1-2 people there that will know what you are tallking about. This is a key feature for why I use debian
Sigs are dangerous coy things
2) Debian will contain the most up-to-date of everything.
My how things have changed.
6) Debian will make Linux easier for users who don't have access to the
Internet.
Debian's main strongpoint is apt-get, which would not be so useful for users with no internet access. The beauty of Debian is that you can install it once and update it forever. Seems Debian's original goals and their current strongpoints are quite different.
Seriously though...when I started reading Slashdot several years ago, all of the cool people were Debian users (including Taco, right?). I was just a straightforward Red Hat guy myself (still am).
But these days, the same voices which always talked about Debian seem to talk about Gentoo, and more to the point...very few people seem to talk about Debian. Apart from turning 10, what's the last major thing it accomplished? I'm sure many people still use it, but the driving force behind it seems to have died. Now it's main distinguishing feature is being the closest-to-official FSF/GNU distro, if you care about stuff like that.
I know apt is great, and Debian's installer, great, whatever, but really...is it still as big as it was?
I remember using debian to cut my teeth on linux. I had a pc(win95) that was hooked up to the internet, which I needed to ask questions and download stuff with. My gf's grandmother gave me a 386-33 with 8 megs of ram and a 130 meg hdd. All isa slots, AT keyboard, NO cdrom drive(no ide adapter, some proprietary cable or something), only a 1.44 floppy. So, I had my choice of debian, using a floppy install, or .... well, just debian. I forget what debian version it was, but it was the 2.0.36 or so kernel(97-98 timeframe), and I only had like 3 floppies, so I had to keep shuffling disks from the win95 machine to the 386 to install debian using floppies. I finally got the basic install done, and then went to configure isa ne2000 nics using linux, being a complete newbie. There was this dude on yahoo chats who helped out. But, going from newbie to getting a system such as above running, adding ipfwadm to make the box a router, added samba to make it a pdc, played with everything possible(given the constraints). I was even smb-mounting my win95 disk over the network to get more space(of course the box crashed and I had stale mount points, yech- windows). I have to say that after an experience with that, using the hardest possible configuration possible to get debian up and running, all command line on a 386 when my first pc had 8 gig hdd(like I said, this was 97-98) teaches you more than you can imagine. Hell, I ran this box for something like 13 months before I knew what X or kde(1.0 days). I was like 'Woa! Linux can do this?' I figured it was just command line, no gui at all. I recommend this method to learn linux. It'll put you on the track to knowing more than your instructor at RHCE classes(guilty, #808002685906747).
Do you see the sig? Do you have it in your sights? Why yes, Miss Moneypenny...
I have been using RedHat for the last 3 years, and am currently using 7.3. This is quite nice for me, and I don't want to upgrade to 9.0 (and every year thereafter) when RH end-of-life's 7.3 at the end of this year. I don't like any company forcing me to upgrade... I think a lot of other people feel the same way. I have looked at Debian (and have it installed on one of my partitions now) but to be honest I am a little disturbed by the lack of good Debian books. There just don't seem to be any really good ones out there, let alone recent editions. The most recent is the Debian/GNU Linux Bible, which is 2001, and gets tepid reviews on Amazon. There are, however, tons of Red Hat books, and I am wondering if this says anything about the longevity of Debian going forward? Surely if the publishers thought there was a market out there, then they would be commissioning new and better books on the subject?
I know all the documentation is "out there" but I've "been there, done that" with regard to rooting out all the distributed sources of documentation which exist on the various topics, and to be honest I don't relish the idea of making my life be "about Debian" for the same amount of time that it took to find out all the little tricks that I now know about my RedHat installation... Switching distributions will never be trivial if you have large pre-existing software packages running. Does anyone have any suggestions for moving away from RedHat, and any reasons why there aren't any good up-to-date books on Debian? I just like having at least one reference on hand - we have good books on Perl, MySQL, Apache, Sendmail - why not Debian as a whole?
Sorry if this seems negative - it's not really, I will in all likelihood be switching come November when my RH Network subscription expires. I can't get over how Red Hat is turning its back on the small users like me who can't afford at the moment to buy Advanced Server licenses, don't want or need support, but just need the errata updates! I mean, I am trying to develop a business here, and if/when I switch to another distro, I won't be coming back. It's just too much hassle (the small details and differences are the ones that kill you, as I'm sure everyone here will agree)... very short sighted on RedHat's part.
Red Hat's attitude reminds me of Netscape's just prior to Microsoft destroying them - Netscape seemed to lose interest in the very people that had made them successful, i.e. the small users out there who used their browser. Netscape thought they could instead focus on the corporate server market, and we all know what happened. I tried calling Red Hat about their policy of "end-of-life" for 7.3 and even 8.0, and all the woman I spoke to would say was that I could always buy the Advance Server edition. I explained that I am in that curious middle-ground position of running serious, production servers and yet not being big enough to be able to afford that, and she basically hung up on me. Unbelievable. If that's their attitude, then to be honest I really do hope that they go out of business.
Suggestions welcomed, and sorry for the rant.