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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."
So, when do we throw a Debian party, have cake and ice cream, and play pin the tail on Bill Gates?
I love apt get. It's always so much easier than reading the article.
My hat is off to you, Ian Murdock.
20 mil and I will! Learn Esperanto with 20M others.
Pretty soon, Debian is going to want to drive, and of course, it'll want it's own car. Curfew? Good luck with that. And then, just when things seem to calm down, bam, you have to pay for college, or it knocks some girl up. It never ends.
What do I think Debian should do next? As the Linux world's leading non-commercial, community-driven distribution, Debian can lead the way in preserving the fragile Linux ecosystem, if it sets its mind to it.
.02
Debian is NOT going to preserve anything. If it continues on its current path (which is fine for me as I am a Debian user) it will find that it is cornered it its own niche.
The rest of the Linux community is moving FORWARD towards the mainstream. Debian remains locked in its "old fashioned ways" and will never be a leader in anything (as far as the MAJORITY will be concerned).
People want ease of use, ease of installation, and commercial applications to be included. They don't want to have to find them somewhere else, manually add a deb repository, and then install.
I have to say that I am nearly 100% pleased with Debian. That's not to say that is what is going to matter in the future. I like staying away from the current direction that Linux is moving but I don't believe that the rest of the community necessarily believes that's the best way to go.
That's my worthless
It kind of sucks to read about all the great ideas and ideals that Debian represents and then get a dose of the real Debian community in #debian.
I'm nowhere being a linux guru, and I'm sure there will be the usual Debian trolls, but after getting through the initial Debian installation as a new Linux user, it has been one of the most satisfying computing experiences I have had in a long time.
It still boggles my mind that my Thinkpad has been running the same initial installation for the last 2 years, without so much as a hiccup.
Everyday I appreciate all the hard (volunteer no less) that has gone into this hodgepodge of kernels and free software that I can use as I see fit.
My thanks to all the persons that make Debian what it is.
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.
Getting through the installer, I realized that Emacs was taking up too much of my diskspace. So hey, Debian has a great package manager right? So I try to remove the emacs package and see that half of debian seemed to depend on emacs. It wasn't long after that I switched to Red Hat.
You know: "Emacs? It's a nice OS, but i lacks a good text-editor!"? Anyway, Debian is just great. But I guess I don't have to tell you that - You hate it our you love it.
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
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."
Today I wrote a comment on Slashdot about the retrospective on Debian on LinuxPlanet.There's also a very nice comment, based in part on my early ideasfrom another slashdot story, it is, as well, retrospective.
All your base are belong to us!
This weekend I celebrated my birthday, and i had a white-frosted carrot cake with a red Debian Swirl on it.
39 candles.
29 for me, 10 for Debian.
w00h00!!
do() || do_not();
and is still only on version 3. Stable as all hell but always a step behind IMO.
It reminded me of many of the reasons I chose Debian as my first Linux distribution (I'm with Red Hat now but that's more a matter of convenience than philosophy)
Debian still stands out as the distro most reflective of the GNU philosophy. Its packaging system is possibly one of the best uses of the GNU development toolchain I've seen, and its division of software between 'free' and 'non-free' in dselect is yet another example that this is the GNU distro.
I must admit, the project seems to be languishing a bit right now in terms of usage; some of this I blame on the lack of availability of the latest unstable packages (Debian seems to be quite conservative as far as this goes, going so far as to use the 2.2 kernel as its default install option). I also wonder whether the success of more commercial distros has to do with the inclusion of non-free software (especially in the form of drivers) and tools that are contrary to the GNU philosphy, yet more in tune with the needs of business users.
Regardless of the fact that I am no longer using Debian, it will always hold a special place in my heart. Thanks for all your hard work.
All my Slash test boxes, including the laptop I'm typing on, run Debian.
Thanks to everyone involved who puts together and maintains the distro. Its package management is top-notch. Excellent work y'all.
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?
/joeyo
2^5
... 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.
I think you're thinking of something else. Seriously, I've been on the debian-users mailing list for a long time, and it's made up almost exclusively of nice, outgoing, helpful people. I've never seen a newbie with a legitimate question get an RTFM from the regulars. Sometimes you'll see stupid questions like "y isn't debyan as cool as red hat?" get flamed, but you'll see that anywhere.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Debian _is_ easy to use.
Just hard to install =)
The FSF doesn't recommend carrot cake, drinking beer, or ironing your underpants either. But it wouldn't be fair to reword that as suggesting they're recommending you don't eat carrot cake, drink beer, or iron your underpants.
In 10 years, couldn't they come up with a better installer? We're talking about a flipping decade here.
This guy is right. I chose debian as my first distribution of Linux to try. Dropped by the IRC channel and loved every minute of it. I've never met a debian guru I didn't like.
Now, that question could've been answered from Google. He also could've read the documentation that shipped with the bittorrent package. In other words, he didn't do much research before asking.
And his first answer was dead-on correct, polite, and non-patronizing.
Yeah, those Debian people are some hard-core elitists.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
+5 Funny? I don't get it.
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.
I like staying away from the current direction that Linux is moving but I don't believe that the rest of the community necessarily believes that's the best way to go.
When people talk about where Linux is going like it's a bus (or bandwagon) I get confused. Who says Debian should be the Linux platform for mainstream commercial apps when MS is overthrown? (If any of that happens; I'm not saying it will.)
Talking about "the Linux community" is like trying to talk about "the Slashdot community"...people try to assign consensus opinions to each group but obviously there is none.
Linux is a kernel, not a movement.
Seriously, I've been on the debian-users mailing list for a long time, and it's made up almost exclusively of nice, outgoing, helpful people. I've never seen a newbie with a legitimate question get an RTFM from the regulars.
Well, be careful. I have seen newbies with legitimate questions get RTFMs there; just not in that form. Rather, they're typically delivered in a less mean-spirited way. For example, someone posting "I got this error message: _______. What does it mean? What do I do?" might get a response of "Google is your friend for this sort of thing. I googled on that error message and got this webpage (________), which has an explanation and a solution." Sometimes a link to Eric Raymond's "How To Ask Questions The Smart Way" will be provided, as well. Much kinder than an RTFM, but in the same vein.
Not that I think that's a bad thing. To me, part of being helpful is to help people learn how to help themselves in the future . . .so long as one does so kindly (which, for the most part, debian-user does, and #debian@freenode doesn't).
But at the same time, I didn't want what you wrote above to give the impression that no one is ever encouraged to do some work themselves.
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?
Actually, that's not true anymore. Things have changed and Debian is not the best example of free software or GNU. Check out GNU/Linex instead.
You'll not see a link to Debian from the FSF/GNU sites for this reason.
You mean, like the one on this page, found by following "Links to other sites" from the main page?
20 mil and I will! Learn Esperanto with 20M others.
The flames come when someone disses on Debian. It usually goes like this:
/etc."
newb: "Debian fucking sucks, it can't do X. And its very hard to do Y."
debian-user: "Why didn't you just use apt-get for Y? And it can do X, you just have to edit some files in
newb: "How the fuck am I suppose to know all that you elitist prick?"
debian-user: "Next time you have a question, go RTFM or do a Google search before you come in here claiming Debian sucks and flaming people."
newb: "Fuck you you fucking ass!!@#$@"
*** newb has been kicked from the channel
--Drunk as in Beer
the only thing keeping debian from being another faceless OS out there is its packaging system and stability record. however, the cost of stability comes at lack of updated software. so you end up downloading the non-stable software anyways, so, what's the point of that? only thing that makes it truly great is the apt-get system. its packaging system is much nicer than RPM.. personally I dislike rpm. it's stingy and sometimes more complicated than it should be.. with debian's system it's like, when you select source, you get the damn source code, you dont get a package that you edit files in then rebuild and then install. personally, if opensource wants to free people from microsoft matrix, they gotta appeal to these users, for some people in opnsource, this is a daunting task becuase they cant go below their level of experience, so what you gotta do is test various systems with certain points that offer the greatest ease.. apt-get would be perfect as the dominant packaging system in most linux distros. an installer much like slackware's would make the almost perfect install (blue linux has a nice easy to understand installer as well) things like that are what are going to make the next revolutionary distro. debian is antiquated in many ways. most people I know get it for either 2 things: to be "elite and cool" or for the packaging system. debian would be nothing without it. seeing an apt-get system replace other packaging systems within major linxu distributions would be a nice change. Also, may I point out that really, in the end, linux is linux, each distribution is just a different profile of packages wrapped around a kernel.
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...
If everybody's switching to commercial, polished, ,uniformized versions of Linux, you can BET Debian's not going to thread that road.
Indeed, innovation has been going a bit slow over the last half of the decade, but I put that on the extreme need for Linux to prove itself in high-demand production environments.
Once we're all really accustomed to a really stable development model around Linux and the Debian community (esp. around "core" packages), I really expect someone to come up with some really funky idea, a new approach for Debian to progress beyond its boundaries.
Remember: if someone's going to come up with something really innovative, I'm betting he'll be in the largest group, and Debian's bigger (in many ways) than the largest of private corporations...
Lex
1)
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.
In interest of disclosure: I use RedHat at work and Gentoo at home.
I personally don't have Debian on any computer I am responsible for. That said, I want Debian to exist. I don't want it to "lead"; I want it to be a sort of reference distro for the rest of us. If I see a package in Debian's stable branch I'm pretty confident that it's a reliable version of that application. No other distro, not even RH Enterprise, gets that much trust from me (though RHE comes close).
Debian's slow package release cycle is a feature, not a bug.
All's true that is mistrusted
Well, just to be fair, I'll quote the "GNU/LinEx Technical Specs":
In other words, GNU/LinEx is a modified version of the Debian GNU/Linux operating system. No, I don't even want to think what the proper name of the system should be if the GNU concept of proper credit is followed.
half of debian seemed to depend on emacs.
Quite a bit of Debian depends upon a text editor. Emacs was probably just what you chose to install. If you were to put even nvi on there, you could remove everything else.