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Make the Debian CDs Better by Installing popcon
JayBonci writes "Not popcorn, popcon! (Short for popularity-contest) According to a recent message posted to debian-devel-announce, popcon numbers are being used to determine how things get arranged on the 13 CDs of the upcoming Debian stable release. Participation so far has been good, but the project could use more numbers from a broader user base. Please take a moment to install the package 'popularity-contest,' and help us make the distro better by allowing it to send us anonymous package usage statistics. You can see the results at Popularity Contest page."
I hate to point it out, but the first kernel-image is in 2794th place.
The automatic hardware detection is nice.
http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/
I asked myself this question when buying Unreal Tournament 2004 the other day and when the employee of the store told me they didn't receive any of the Special Edition DVD version. I was kind of baffled as to why they didn't make it a DVD only release, but it kind of makes sense to me.. It's not entirely safe to assume that that many people have DVD-ROMs, at least from a manufacturing perspective. I think that when you register the game you can send your system specs in thus allowing th company to know... Sorry for getting kind of off-topic but the same concept stands true in this case I think. Think of how many people have cd-burners compared to dvd-burners? Probably a big ratio.. so it makes more sense to put everything on a format that almost everyone has access to. (Note: ALMOST)
This is Debian - the sources are there, you can see for yourself what it's really doing.
Join the Free Software Foundation
Actually, the best way is to just use Disc 1, get the base installation, and then do the rest via network (assuming you're on broadband - I shudder to think what an installation would be like over dialup).
This way you get the latest "stable" (oxymoron, I know) and all of the security updates as well.
I install Debian this way all the time (well, every time I'm doing a fresh installation).
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
In case people are reading this and think it's cool and want to try Debian out. I suggest they read this page before they go looking for ISO's to burn.
The Official Debian installer is one the things people heavily judge the distro by.
Do not read this
There is also a ~30MB business-card netinstall that does the same thing.
You have to use jigdo, and you can't use Windows to download the image, but it's there.
Because with windows you get NOTHING.
You get an operating system, a windowing system, a media player, a web browser and email client, a SMB client and server, and some small utilities and games.
The 13CDs of Debian contain almost every known piece of software that meets the DFSG and someone can be bothered packaging. And yet the smallest Debian install is still far smaller than the smallest Windows install.
Advanced users are users too!
Debian will release the next STABLE version when it's ready, always their answer. You can think of debian stable as having always done the sort of stuff RedHat, Mandrake and Suse are all looking to do now, build long term releases not "forcing" full system upgrades every few months. That all being said even Debian are hoping to speed up the release process, the next release will be the first release to come out of testing and is ironing out the kinks in that system. Also, it is moving rapidly towards a release. Debian-installer is now usable (for certain values of usable) on 6 platforms and the release critical bugs are dropping down to where a release should be quickly achievable (once all the main pieces are in place). I would be surprised if debian doesn't release before the Autumn (I'd guess June/July).
As the other reply to your post pointed out though, if stable doesn't do you testing (or even unstable) should do it!
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
Actually, the best way is to just use Disc 1, get the base installation, and then do the rest via network (assuming you're on broadband - I shudder to think what an installation would be like over dialup).
Where I work, we have a local 100Mbit Debian stable mirror. When ever we install debian on a customer's machine, or one of our own, we obviously set the apt-sources to use the local. It's usually faster than installing off of multiple CD's (all I've ever seen is debian CD1, I wasn't even aware that there were 13 of them). Interesting to think that, for a lot of things, a 48x cdrom is slower than ethernet... but whatever. Plus we get lots of "Hey, what the heck mirror am I using, it's fast!?!?", and it makes us smile.
HTTP is the way to go for local mirrors, by the way, especially when getting multiple packages (like, say, "base system"?). That is, you're using vsftp, because you obviously care about security, and you're also too lazy to set up something that tells vsftp (or is it xinetd) to shut up, no that's not someone DDoSing the connection, those are real transfers. And by you, I mean me.
~Will
sig?
Actually, the best way is to just use Disc 1, get the base installation, and then do the rest via network (assuming you're on broadband - I shudder to think what an installation would be like over dialup).
When you can get a DVD+-R to work in another computer, the DVD's (1 for stable, 2 for testing or unstable) are quite nice. If you have hard-drive space to burn you can also grab the ISO's and mount them using loopback devices.
Enjoy your job, make lots of money, work within the law. Choose any two.
Unknown means they are running popcon from woody, rather than sarge/sid. The older version of popcon did not send architecture data, while the newer one does.
It's a whopping huge deficiency in Debian's installation as a large number of people will assume that if they are able to boot then they have a kernel package installed and *MORE SERIOUSLY* that apt-get update/upgrade will install kernel security updates as they come along!
It's a known bug in the Woody installer and is fixed in the Sarge installer. Obviously a kernel is installed. The problem is that dpkg doesn't about it. You can fix the problem by installing the same kernel over itself if you're happy with the default 2.4 or 2.2 kernel.
Some recent discussion of the problem.
Er, popularity-contest isn't installed by default. And even when I user installs it they get a blurb saying what the program does and the choice on whether or not to participate.
Yes, vi gets more installations, but approximately 2/3 of them are marked as old.
Only 1/3 of the people, or 597 people actually use vi.
For emacs, a mere 1/6 of them are old and 2/3 of the people, or 996 people use it.