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Debian World Domination Plan
An anonymous reader writes "Guillem Jover announced his plans to take over the non-Debian world and released a tool which converts in
runtime any distribution to Debian. It does not convert in the sense
of mapping all previous installed packages to the Debian counterparts,
but installs a base system or tarball and cleans traces from the
previous distribution."
UHM... correct me if I'm wrong, but I think KDE works pretty well in Debian/unstable? I fail to see your point.
-pug
From the code:
/etc/debian_version ]
[...]
if [ -e
then
if [ "$DISTRO" = unknown ]; then
error 1 "You already have a Debian system"
[...]
If you read the script, you'll notice that it will detect that and will bail out with an error message:
-- The Internet is a too slow way of doing things, you'd never do without it.
Well, it's a simple 12KiB shell script, nothing much to see there. It's well written and it's a nice idea, though.
I would wait a couple releases before using it in a real environment though... hotswapping releases is a very tricky matter, and can screw up majorly your computer, expecially if it's done via a script.
My Stack Overflow user
IIRC It was originally intended to convert a redhat installation in a server where the provider would only install redhat.
Speaking as a debian user for many years:
They do have a stable, modern distribution. It's called "testing". The not-so modern "stable" distribution is a dream tho.. You could drive a 15 ton tank through it and it'd still stay up. I've been running it on server (in the wild) for more than 2 years now with nary a problem. It's easy to maintain and has everything I need no more than an apt-get away. No recompilation, no searching for dependencies.. unlike some other distributions I've used.
I wish everything was that easy.
(I was only an egg, but then I cracked)
As the website seems to be down, here's a link to the Google cache
What is colo?
co-location i.e. a server running in your ISP's building with an excellent internet connection. Usually you'll only get physical access in extreme circumstances so you have to administer them entirely remotely.
NetBSD counts anything that requires a different kernel as an architecture, whereas Debian counts anything that requires a different userspace as an architecture. If you use the same terminology in both cases, the numbers work out pretty even.
jadams@fuzball:~$ apt-cache search kde | wc -l
580
jadams@fuzball:~$
Hmmm.... looks like it's there to me. I don't really use it but it's there.
jadams@fuzball:~$ apt-cache policy kde
kde:
Installed: (none)
Candidate: 4:2.2.25
Version Table:
4:3.1.2 0
500 http://http.us.debian.org sid/main Packages
4:2.2.25 0
500 http://http.us.debian.org woody/main Packages
990 http://http.us.debian.org sarge/main Packages
jadams@fuzball:~$
Yeah even looks supported.
Contrast this to KNOPPIX. It is a delight. And it's based on Debian.
Stick Men
there installer, it simply requires far too much manual tweaking to get from a first install to a useable system, other distro are far better here
/complaint
Their, not there.
I for one like the Debian installer. My current testing/unstable system was installed from the first Woody CD - I just installed the base, no extra packages. Then I could just pick and choose whatever I liked from there. This is really useful if you just want to put together a small, clean server with nothing superfluous. I'd feel very uncomfortable settling for one of eg. Redhat's predefined installation choices. I would feel less in control, and it really wouldn't save me any time anyway. A few minutes perhaps.
there 'stable' concept, it just doesn't make sense
Their, not there.
Damn right it doesn't make sense! stable really borders on being useless. The release cycle is just too long to be of much relevance. And as you said, older software isn't necessary more stable, and could well be worse.
Unfortunately this filters up to unstable as well. Debian's 'X Strike Force' hasn't got 4.3.0 into unstable yet. 4.3.0 was released in February 2003. It might not even get into unstable before 4.4.0 comes out! Now that's a long time.
IMHO Debian needs to cut back on the number of supported architectures and not be so tolerant of packages with bugs that are 100's of days old marked against them.
try the MEPIS distro. it is debian based and very easy to install. it has hardware detection and other easy tools.
THE reference for such matters is Distrowatch
And then he said: "I'll tell you the meaning of life. It is" and then realized 120 chars are definitely not enough...
I too, was a loyal Red Hat user until they started messing with KDE. So, I came on Slashdot and read a comment where someone was saying Mandrake was "Red Hat Lite". So, I gave Mandrake 9.0 a try, and I've since upgraded to 9.1 (will upgrade to 9.2 soon), and I've not looked back.
Knoppix is also an amazing distro, if you only ever need it for a system recovery disk then it's still worth the time and bandwidth to grab it.
I'd recommend starting with those two, and I will mention that here on slashdot Debian and Gentoo are also extremely popular, and SuSe and Slackware also have vocal fans.
But - check out http://www.linuxiso.org and see what all they have.
Hope this helps!
NetBSD you say?
Guess what? There's Debian/[GNU/]NetBSD!
My english is sow-sow. Sowhat?
4.3 isn't in unstable because of cross-platform compatibility issues. Every person using Sid out there knows they can get XFree86 4.3 from Debian Experimental for x86 and it works great.
Now, can you mention another package in a similar situation?
Debian stable is undoubtedly the best distro to put on a server. Every single package or combination of them has already been tested. I have yet to see anything that doesn't work on stable, or anything whose debconf script would set up perfectly.
That said, Debian Stable's target is obviously *not* the desktop.
My english is sow-sow. Sowhat?
Just like the instant BSD thing that was posted a couple of weeks ago.
Nice to see it extended beyond BSD to other systems.
Now all we need is a win32 virus to initiate 'upgrading' to your choice of *nix flavor.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Did you look at the Readme? The main purpose of this script is to convert a colo server that is installed with Redhat or the like by default, BEFORE you modify it. It will make backups of you configuration and data, but running this script on an in-use server is an unrealistic scenario unless you don't mind some downtime setting things up again.
Try to find an ISP that provides Debian colo's. There aren't many.
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
I'm thinking of starting a PC recycling business because most trashed PCs these days are still acceptable performers.
Free Geek in Portland Oregon does this as a non-profit. One of the keys to their success is lots of trainable volunteers, because they reward volunteer hours with a refurbished computer. Another key is that businesses and individuals who donate old computer systems get receipts for their charitable donation (but it is up to the donor to determine the value of the donation). When some area business upgrades, they rent a U-Haul truck to bring the old computers to Free Geek. It's an interesting thing to see.
Hell, on a Debian system you should be able to mostly accomplish the same thing with a virtual package that conflicts with all "unnecessary" servers.
you have problems. its so easy
/target/drive http://ftp.debian.org
p aring.en.html
...
get knoppix
boot it
fdisk your HD
debootstrap sid
[wait here a bit]
chroot into drive and finish setup according to this page: http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/ch-pre
I have setup all of my servers like this (get XFS easily that way) and same at home. thought you have to trick around a bit to get XFree 4.3, if only that damn thing would compile on all architectures so it can go into unstable (sid) tree
lg
"Freiheit ist immer auch die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden" - Rosa Luxemburg, 1871 - 1919
From their FAQ:
If we're going to be starting another distro war, I think everyone should take a look at these three projects which aim to release a free edition of RedHat Enterprise Linux. Once you've got one of these running, even if these distro go under, you can still get SRPMS security updates from RH and build them yourself through 2008.
Tao Linux
White Box Linux
cAos
That's the cool thing about Debian stable. It _has_ gotten all the security updates. Debian backports every single one. If a security fix can't be backported, then they will bite the bullet and move the most tested secure version into the stable distribution. Security first, then stability, then everything else.
There have been new kernel packages recently to correct the exploits, such as the local exploit used in the Debian incident. This affected all kernels, of course, and had nothing to do with Debian per se. When you upgrade the kernel, of course you have to reboot. Stability isn't just (or necessarily at all) about getting long uptimes. It's also about controlling downtime. Almost all applications can handle being down for 90 seconds at 3:42 AM on a Sunday morning.
Another benefit of this patching method is that you aren't forced to upgrade programs _just_ because old ones have security problems that you, personally, can't afford to backport. If your application relies on MySQL or some other fairly complex program, you really don't want to be upgrading that at all without testing, if you can help it. If it wasn't for Debian, you'd get all the latest features (and all the latest bugs) along with the security update. Debian takes care of that for you and you can keep using the old, known-stable version.
If the hard drive actually shows up as /dev/hde when booting with the debian installer cd, you could try booting the debian installer with the ide=reverse parameter, this should make your drive show up as /dev/hda, by reversing the sort order of the ide controlers
That wouldn't help if your controller actually isn't recognised by the debian boot kernel of course.
> Ever run win2k3? No? Because win9x sucked so hard? double standards are fun.
Exactly what in my post makes you assume I've never run the later Windows, and that I don't judge it based on the exact same standards I apply to Debian and whatever other distro I happen to be running right now?
As it happens, as far as closeness to the ideal "it should Just Work, the way *I* want it to" goes, even the latest Windows are behind on both counts -- partly because its idiosyncrasies are often hard to solve, when they're end-user solvable at all, while that of my current chosen Linux distro are not for whomever knows what they're doing, which I like to believe I do. Thus making that distro much closer to the "Just Works" ideal for me than Windows.
Some of us DO check out competing offers and then decide purely on which is the best tool, which doesn't have to be the one your biases (or paycheck) drags you to. Cope.
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
Chapter 3.7 of the Debian Install HOWTO describes a cross install method for debian which works quite well.
I used it when I needed to install debian on a computer with new adaptec scsi controller which was only supported in 2.4.22+ :- boot Knoppix
- Follow Cross Install Instructions
- Ready.
Ok, it's not One-click-cross-install (tm).But if you need such a tool, why are you installing debian? You'd better use Fedora, Mandrake or Suse in this case.
while (!asleep()) sheep++
2 days at most, less if you don't emerge too many large packages like OpenOffice.
there are binary packages availeable for Gentoo, just so you know...
good luck
In addition to this, the Gentoo distribution would have been compiled from source and heavily optimised for your system, whereas your typical Debian binary package is optimised for 386.
386, you know, just in case the person couldn't afford a 486.
Or maybe it's because the 486 wasn't out yet when some of Debian's packages were last updated.