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Debian Fastest-Growing Distro, Says Netcraft
Oskuro writes "According to this story at news.netcraft.com, Debian was the fastest growing distribution in the last 6 months, closely followed by SuSE and Gentoo. RedHat, while still reigning, has started to lose sites in Netcraft's survey after they announced the end of support for their desktop releases. The survey is based on the stats from webservers which include the distribution name in their webserver's header." Maybe it would grow even faster when Java issues are worked out -- read more below on that.
adamy writes "For people like me that use both Free/Open Source software and Java, the two have come together with two major exception: The Java Virtual Machine and the Base Libraries. Seems the folks trying to get Java packages ready for Sarge could have listed the issues. This is an interesting example of dependency tree pruning: Several packages are orphaned because they depend on Ant, which depends on Swing. Swing has been lower priority for the Classpath because most of the java pacakages are server side or lack a UI componenet."
...is right here.
Lots of discussions on library dependencies and Kaffe and such like are in the January archives.
The Army reading list
Not suprised one bit. Both Debian and Gentoo are the only two usable UP TO DATE distro's that will run on a sparcstation. They obviously care to encompass EVERYONE who might use their OS, and gladly, Ill join that line.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
to me, it says that a lot of mid-sized sites got burned with red hat's recent killing of rh9. when the option is either a) pony up $400 or b) move to this untested hobby distro (fedora) that requires a complete re-install anyway, people start looking at other distros.
Upgrades are half price -- $174.50 for ES, which isn't that bad if you need the support and RHN.
Or go look at Progeny, who is not only providing "transition" support for RH 7, 8 & 9 users but was also just awarded LSB certification.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
this untested hobby distro (fedora) that requires a complete re-install anyway
That's quite a trolling from your part.
I have installed Fedora on my RedHat 7.3 machines using apt-get (for rpm) and only in 1 reboot, so it doesn't require a full reinstallation.
And also Fedora is the evolution from RedHat 9, even if it have bugs (as all distros) it's stable and ready for production.
May the source be with you!
[...] or b) move to this untested hobby distro (fedora) that requires a complete re-install anyway, people start looking at other distros.
I'm going to have to call FUD on this. Why would installing Fedora Core require a complete re-install? Doing an upgrade from Red Hat Linux 9 works fine.
For that matter, what's untested about it? Red Hat has to take some of the blame for this confusion, but in actuality, Fedora Core has gotten just as much pre-relese testing as previous consumer-level Red Hat distributions -- probably more, with the more-open development model.
It's also not *really* a hobby distro, any more than Debian is.
so, yeah, i'll be migrating our twelve servers from red hat to suse sometime in the next month or so.
Now *that* will take a complete reinstall. SuSE is a great distro so there's nothing wrong with that, but I suggest you take a second look at Fedora first.
The above poster is right. People want to run Java servers on their Linux boxes.
But the fact that Debian currently has some issues with installing those automatically shouldn't hold things back. Certainly, Red Hat aren't going out of their way to support Java.
And as far as Ant goes, it's not that hard to install:
antversion=1.6.0{
cd
wget -O - "http://apache.inspire.net.nz/ant/binaries/apache
ln -sf
echo "export ANT_HOME=/usr/local/apache-ant
export PATH=\$PATH:/usr/local/apache-ant/bin" >
chmod +x
}
FWIW, I run Linux Virtual Private Servers with a bunch of Java hosting tools like Tomcat preinstalled on my distros.
And, at least for me, Red Hat (including Fedora) is still outselling Debian by 5.3 to 1. Maybe it's because I install apt-rpm on the Red Hat boxes to make them just as easy to manage as the Debian ones :)
I'd have to argue with you on this one. When you install Gentoo...it starts off about as bare bones as you can be....stuff gets added as YOU choose to.
Its pretty much a 'built from scratch' system, but, it does manage your dependencies quite well for you...that and all the flags can help optimize just about every application you install, since they are all compiled from scratch (with the exception of some things like the NVIDIA binary drivers).
Give it a look...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Actually, Red Hat folks release Fedora updates for current releases. Here's the one from Monday for slocate, for example. Notice the redhat.com return address, and if you look at the package, you'll see it was built by a Red Hat engineer on a Red Hat system.
Older releases will be handled by the Fedora Legacy project, and while it'll take a little bit for that to get settled in, I'm highly confidant that it'll be a success. Again, see Debian -- "hobbyists" can do a good job of keeping security updates current.
None of the commercial vendors impressed me with their technical support, which is funny since I paid them for it. Red Hat of course dropped support for their desktop distribution altogether.
Both gentoo and Debian, in my experience, have extremely friendly communities who are willing to answer even my worst inane questions ("How can I get video1394 to load automatically on boot?")
I ran gentoo for probably six months, but the cost of compiling everything once a week to keep up-to-date just wore me down, especially on the laptop. I know it has binary packages, but not for everything, and anyway I was all proud of myself for having optimized binaries for AMD...
Well, no more. Now I'm on Debian and I'll probably stay there. It has the best "everything just works" rating out of all of them, even the commercial distros. Well, it has the best rating after you've installed discover. (And why doesn't discover load video1394 when it sees my firewire cable? It seems to know to load raw1394...)
My only complaint is that there needs to be kernel-image packages that have ACPI compiled in.
I'm impressed enough with Debian that I intend to install it on 50 desktops at work, if only I can convince management of the benefits of doing so. (Especially with Fully Automated Installation, woo hoo.)
Wow, a lucrative publishing contract! I don't have to be evil anymore. --Meteor
You can do a PROPER install of Debian with the MEPIS live CD.
http://www.mepis.org/
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
When will people learn?
apt-get dist-upgrade is meant for that: DISTRIBUTION upgrade. You've been running woody, want to run sarge, apt-get dist-upgrade.
Other than that, it CAN cause breakage. It is meant to remove all traces of the previous distribution, thus it defaults to _remove_ packages which do not exist in the new one.
For everyday use you type apt-get upgrade (no dist-). It upgrades to the new packages, and when conflicts arise it always assumes the conservative approach (leave you with non-upgrade packages instead of breaking).
Well - I never really got this one. I actually like Debian's strict policy on software licenses even if it now and then causes some inconvenience. As for Java - well - it didn't take me long to realize that I needed the original - and that Blackdown have a ready made Debian package that can be included in apt's sources.list. That's all - one line in a configuration file and you've got perfectly working Java in Debian.
And here's the line:
deb ftp://ftp.tux.org/pub/java/debian/ testing non-free main
By the way - I would assume this problem to be exactly the same on all other Linux distro's due to SUN's licensing. Isn't that so?