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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."
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.
How does one help Debian copy-edit this piece? It really needs it. It was clearly written by a non-native English speaker, which is neither here nor there, but it does need some cleanup...
I Edit
The previous sig has been removed due to
- 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.
Are those projects still in active development?
I would like to get involved in a distribution for lawyers... since I intend to become a lawyer before the year is up (taking the bar at the end of July).
I've been very impressed with the stability and with apt. I do wish that Debian had a little quicker package release but at the price, I really can't complain too much.
Yesterday I had a another wonderful experience during an install. We have an old Dell PowerEdge 2000 PIII 450 w/ Perc/SC2 raid. I was having trouble getting it going under the Woody install. For grins, I decided to try the Sarge installer . EVERYTHING just worked! It saw the Intel EEPro100 and the RAID controller - both of these were problematic under Woody.
Of course I would like a faster release and better hardware detection during install. Kudzu with Knoppix does work well. Packages that I want to run right now are still not packaged in .deb (Zope 2.7, Plone 2.0)but it's not a show-stopper.
The bottom line, Debian has the true open-source community and distribution. It has excellect quality control. It has excellent responsiveness to security issues. Debian has the potential to be the "one true distribution" and Sarge is looking very good!
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
The main beef that people have with Debian is the dated packages.
While most of the trolls from Gentoo Zealots (No attack vs Gentoo here, I'm a Gentoo user myself) and the like are unfounded because they speak vs packages in Woody; there are still a ton of packages in sarge and sid that are less than current.
The problem with this is not the fault of the Debian Developers, it's the fact that Debian supports a vast number of architectures as well as a vast number of packages, causing QUITE alot to update, even with a minor version number change on one package.
NetBSD is the only platform other than debian to successfully nearly this many architectures. The way that NetBSD does it is source packaging; I do not think that this is the way for debian to go.
What needs to happen is a project to support Debian for a few platforms: the x86, the PPC, the sparc, and maybe two or three others. Classic Debian would run parallel to this, and obscure archs would still be supported.
Two new package trees, called something like desktop-sarge and desktop-sid, would be mirrors of the sid and sarge trees, but only support the major archs. This way, a DD doesn't have to compile vs 37 or whatever archs before he updates his package; the new version would come out for the major archs early, and the obscure archs could wait until however long it took.
Instead of everyone waiting for months.
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.
Try this
2) Recent updates. Something from the 21st century would be nice. Debian's "stable" is positively ancient.
brainstorm:~# cat /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian unstable main contrib non-free
deb ftp://ftp.tux.org/pub/java/debian unstable main non-free
brainstorm:~# dpkg -l kdebase
ii kdebase 3.2.1-1 KDE Base ..
brainstorm:~#
Pretty recent, huh?
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.
Them just use it, man! U don't have to be an apostole to put the CD in the drive, intsall, boot and use it! It is a pretty damn good distro AND it worries about political/social questions, but if u don't care about that, fine, it stills a damn good distro!
- no sig.
...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)
What they do need: 1) ftp-able ISOs. No jigdo crap.
You mean like this one, or would you prefer a different mirror.
2) Recent updates. Something from the 21st century would be nice.
Well, could be wrong, but looks like gnome 2.6.0 packages began appearing on 3/27 for x86, and yesterday for power pc. How much more recent do you want? (does any other distro have gnome 2.6 yet?)
Debian's "stable" is positively ancient.
True, and I'm not happy about it either. But as I understand it consensus last summer was to wait on the new installer. Holdup seems to be getting folks to test it on all the different platforms Debian supports. Meanwhile Debian's "testing" is more stable than most folks releases; hell, so's their "unstable" for that matter.
Last I read Debian hopes to release "Sarge" this summer. You can help that happen by testing the installer.
From the developer's perspective, by making a Custom Debian Distribution, my project, Debian Jr., can afford to focus strictly on making Debian better for children, and not have to worry about providing a whole new infrastructure that is necessary for a Debian derivative.
From the user's perspective, they are going right to the source for support and bug reporting, rather than filtering everything through a third party. They don't need to worry about whether package foo from Debian main will work with their Debian derivative or not. And if package foo *does* break, someone is actually on the hook for fixing it, whereas with a derivative you're likely to encounter this:
User: Package 'foo' is broken when I use it with Debian derivative 'bar'. Help!
Derivative developer: Sorry, that's your problem. We don't maintain 'foo'.
Debian developer: Sorry, that's your problem, I don't run 'bar', so I can't debug it.
--
synrg at debian dot org
I've been handing Knoppix disks out to computer illiterate folks I know. They can use it as a toy, and get used to the idea that Linux is something they can use. Knoppix has some little games, a nice web browser, they can write stuff, they can get pictures from their digital cameras (I do have to show them how to do the last two things, since there aren't icons on the desktop for ``write a paper'' and ``digital camera''.).
For these guys, Knoppix means exposure to Linux, and just a little bit of familiarity and de-mistification. The lack of commitment is vital here: these guys are deathly afraid of screwing up their machines. This is definitely casual flirtation, but that's a huge step forward with this crowd.
I've been giving Knoppix disks to computer literate friends, too. For them, it's a chance to find out that Linux really does work on their hardware, that they really can do their work on it (they suspect that's true, so they're interested), and that they really can install it and keep it up to date.
For this bunch, there is usually some Linux application that they want to run, but the new set of system administration tasks and the installation difficulty scares them off. With Knoppix, they can see how easy it is to install, and they can seriously evaluate it. This is FAR from casual flirtation! Not all of this crowd winds up using Linux daily, but most of them wind up with it on their hard drives, and their minds are opened a bit.
Over all, I'd say that Knoppix is doing a lot of good. It's letting people progress a lot farther towards using Linux than they would ever go without this sort of distribution.
See what I've been reading.
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."