Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Debian Fastest-Growing Distro, Says Netcraft

Posted by timothy on from the all-statistics-are-flawed-of-course dept.

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."

2 of 516 comments (clear)

  1. Not suprised by TheRealMindChild · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
  2. Re:How is Java relevant here? by rimu+guy · · Score: 5, Informative

    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 /usr/local
    wget -O - "http://apache.inspire.net.nz/ant/binaries/apache- ant-$antversion-bin.tar.gz" | tar xz
    ln -sf /usr/local/apache-ant-$antversion /usr/local/apache-ant
    echo "export ANT_HOME=/usr/local/apache-ant
    export PATH=\$PATH:/usr/local/apache-ant/bin" > /etc/profile.d/ant.sh
    chmod +x /etc/profile.d/ant.sh
    }

    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 :)