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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 [ "$DISTRO" = unknown ]; then
error 1 "You already have a Debian system"
[...]
Well, it's a simple 12KiB shell script, nothing much to see there. It's well written and it's a nice idea, though.
I would wait a couple releases before using it in a real environment though... hotswapping releases is a very tricky matter, and can screw up majorly your computer, expecially if it's done via a script.
My Stack Overflow user
IIRC It was originally intended to convert a redhat installation in a server where the provider would only install redhat.
Speaking as a debian user for many years:
They do have a stable, modern distribution. It's called "testing". The not-so modern "stable" distribution is a dream tho.. You could drive a 15 ton tank through it and it'd still stay up. I've been running it on server (in the wild) for more than 2 years now with nary a problem. It's easy to maintain and has everything I need no more than an apt-get away. No recompilation, no searching for dependencies.. unlike some other distributions I've used.
I wish everything was that easy.
(I was only an egg, but then I cracked)
jadams@fuzball:~$ 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
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!
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.
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