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Custom Debian Distributions
Andreas Tille writes "When the first Custom Debian Distribution - Debian Junior - started in the beginning of 2000 we did not expect that this would perhaps lead to a new way Debian could support its end users in general. The next step forward was done in DebConf3 in Oslo when several developers who care about Custom Debian Distributions met in person and decided to work together more closely. Finally at OSWC conference in Malaga took place a workshop aiming at exactly this issue. The result of the conference was to write a paper about Custom Debian Distributions to explain to the public what we had done and what we want to do. This is an implicit call for participation for all those people inside and outside Debian who work on the same goal: Enhance the role of Debian as the missing link between upstream software developers and end users."
The raw Debian in it's current state seems more like a "platform" and less like a distro...it would be great to see debian make a bratnce base on raw debian like mozilla did with firefox...is this what they are trying to do with Jr then its a very good step..or am i missing something.
Debian has grown as far as users, software and continues to grow with the Linux community. Its abilities to be able to drop in a vanilla Linux kernel and go while being able to be quite flexable as far as setup goes for the user makes it one of the best distributions out there. Apt and dpkg are some of the finest software management tools I've seen in the unix community next to BSD's ports system.
Debian will continue to grow, as will the debian community hopefully for the better of the GNU/Linux world.
- get a real usenet group, not just a gated email list
- create a friendly user community that doesn't slam people for asking questions "improperly"
On the first point, debian-users is a huge, high traffic list that. Being able to pop into usenet is preferable for someone with only an occasional question. The gated list has failed.
On the second point, people can & do to get turned away from a product by rude encounters.
Yah, some people claim that is fine that they don't want "your kind of user", but the quote above belies the fact that the Debian project people want end users.
All of the excuses for slamming people are washed away by the simple fact that reading and posting on the internet is 100% voluntary.
If someone thinks a question is unworthy they should not waste their time by finishing reading it and they certainly shouldn't spend their time answering the question.
Doing and complaining,/i> about either given the voluntary nature of the internet makes them look like a mean loser.
It also drives the end users the Debian project people say they want away.
Steve Both of these points are about providing accessible help and support.
Just want to point out a subtle hypocrisy...
If Microsoft referred to themselves as "upstream developers", they'd have hell to pay.
Laws are for people with no friends.
Debian does *not* need to be creating distros for LAYWERS. What they do need:
1) ftp-able ISOs. No jigdo crap.
2) Recent updates. Something from the 21st century would be nice. Debian's "stable" is positively ancient.
3) If Debian wants more participants, then take a page from Linus -- lose the attitude. I want Linux, not a freakin' religion. We're peers, not apostles.
Randy
... another l337 distro. But it has an extremely user-friendly and helpful web forum forums.gentoo.org.
The Gentoo forum attracts new users because it is an easy and user-friendly way to get help... it is also nicely designed. It doesn't require approval by a moderator to ask a question.
The Debian answer to every complaint is basically "this is free, we don't have to please you." Which is certainly true and understandable. But Gentoo is just as free.
So I recommend Gentoo to people who want to learn Linux... later, after they don't need help anymore, they can always switch to Debian.
Even though I use Debian now, I still go to the Gentoo forums to look for how-tos and other information that is not specific to that distro.
Come to think of it, Gentoo's documentation is a lot more easy to deal with too.
And what's with the Spartan Debian web site? Is it being plain for plain's sake?
Let the flames begin.
Mandrake and Suse have a single admin suite that does everything. Some people love them, and I'll admit that they do look polished. I just don't like having to have a bunch of extra backends installed for hardware and services I don't have just to have the admin tool installed. I haven't really tried Ark, Lycoris, Lindows, or Libranet (Ark wouldn't either wouldn't install or wouldn't run after install, I forget) but my assumption is that being KDE based, they have the same feel of one big tool.
I really like the package selection available on Debian. But getting things to run the way I want can sometimes be a chore. On a previous attempt at debian I had trouble with IDE drivers after install. I couldn't get my USB mouse to work and was ridiculed on #debian for loading the usbmouse module instead the obvious task of installing usbmanager. When I asked the #debian folks for the location of an testing/unstable net install CD it took ten minutes of people asking why I didn't want to use floppies to install stable and then dist-upgrade. I don't have a floppy.
The new instaler is a super awesome step. I like that the debian install actually installs a kernel package now, and that in expert mode I can choose which kernel to install. But fonts still suck ass and I can't seem to improve some of them (gdm, the gnome login splash screen, and the gnome logout dialog). I didn't have trouble getting my USB mouse to work this time, but I can't get my thinkpad 600X's touchpad to work (and yes I've tried the config from the sites on the webring found at www.linux-thinkpad.org). Red Hat and Mandrake support the PS/2 touchpad and hotplugging a USB mouse out of the box. Copying my RH config didn't work. Configuring it by hand per the docs doesn't work.
I've recently discovered (in the process of installing flashplugin-nonfree and msttcorefonts) the update-* commands. But they seem to be there mostly to effect changes you have written into the config files already. I've found nothing so far on Debian which helps me get the config files right.
So finally arriving at the point of my post, I would like to see Red Hat's system-config-* set of single-purpose config tools ported to debian. I do realise that the RH tools aren't the penultimate solution (they haven't worked for me getting a Riva TNT2 with nvidia driver and Voodoo2 with tdfx driver dual-head setup working so far), but I think they're better than anyone else's offerings so far.
...is because a friend(Jeff Teunnissen) recommended it to me. He's also a Debian developer.
... After a while, I learned to RTFM, especially after I started asking questions he couldn't answer.
For the first few months, whenever I ran into a problem I couldn't figure out on my own, I called him (I lived in the same general neighborhood.) I also hung out in an IRC chat room where a bunch of kindly Linux users also hung out
Debian was the first distribution of Linux I ran (aside from Red Hat 5.2, which I ran for a day...), and most of what I know about Linux I learned on my Debian machines.
The moral of the story, I guess, is to have someone you know around to ask questions of. Among my friends just trying out Linux, I recommend Debian, and offer my advice.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
+ Good package management system
+ Good influence on the free software community
- Elitistic tendencies
- Lots of flamewars
- Moving too slowly
? Conservative
? Lots of packages
? Supports many architectures
For me personally, the last points are negative. I don't mind about 11 architectures, since most of them I will never use. In my summary, Debian actually ends up with negative score. But this is subjective of course. For some people, 11 architectures are more important than a release with current software.
Well, in terms of the former, RMS has pissed off the Debian community quite a bit lately. Between the GFDL fiasco and his labeling Debian as not free enough because it has the non-free section of the archive, he's not been too kind to what is undoubtedly the distro most concerned with Free Software as such.
As for the latter, there's all sorts of distro bashing in any forum. That's the way it is. It's called friendly rivalry. If you actually look at what's going on above the IRC level, there's a lot of real cooperation going on between the distros, for all the petty rivalry. Lots of Debian Developers, for instance, are employed by Redhat.
Yes, mwilson is a complete and utter ass hole. Yes, he's known to be as such. But you're judging a whole channel based on one guy. You do have
The Debian Developers have, as a whole, written off #debian. I think most developers would want to see it as totally separate from the project as a whole, which at this point it probably is. A major reason for that is that the users don't let the project know that they want a good IRC channel where they can get help. Most developers see it as useless. If you want the channel to be more tightly regulated by the project, I recommend sending a mail to debian-project and letting them know how you feel. If there's enough people who really want the channel to be policed differently and brought more in to the fold of the project itself, please speak up so you can actually influence things. Unless you'd rather just complain on slashdot more.
Way to judge an entire distribution based on its IRC channel. Talk about professional!
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
I'm currently working my way through the book Linux From Scratch, and as the host for that I used a massively stripped install of RH 7.3.
I figure if I want emphasis on user-friendliness over stability, security, and configurability, I might as well go back to Windows. I'm not going back to Windows though, because I want those things...a system customised to my machine and my way of doing things, and a system which doesn't break once I've put in the work setting it up. I can't get that from Windows...and I also can't get it from a commercialistic, predigested wants-to-be-Windows Linux distribution. The people out there who are determined to win Windows users over to Linux by making Linux into a clone of Windows should stop and think occasionally about what such a thing could potentially do to Linux.
The people who will slam someone for asking an "unworthy question" when they have just ignored the question are also people who are very sensitive to and malleable by public censure.
When one of these losers slams someone for asking an "unworthy" question all that is necessary is that someone else say something like:
Thats it.The person who stands up to the bully can stop right there, answer that users question, or add politiely:
All of which is far less typing then the usual flames you mentioned ( I've seen them too ).There is no need to immature or to work against Debian project goals of attracting more end users.
Steve