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Interview with Debian Project Leader
brunotorres writes "I've interviewed Martin Michlmayr, Debian project leader. In this interview we talked about the upcoming Debian release, Sarge. An excerpt: 'We heard for years that Debian is hard to install and the old installer wasn't very easy to maintain or advance, so we we decided to throw the installer away and start from scratch. The new installer is much more modular, which makes it easier to maintain and extend.'" Reader ron_ivi points out that new Debian/Hurd CDs are available. Newsforge and Slashdot are both part of OSTG.
http://www.ubuntulinux.org/ They will mail (snail) you 10 copies for free... The installer is nice and the desktop looks pretty damn good... Uptown (not an Ubuntu salesman) Joe
See what I've been reading.
Bran muffins and whiskey.
The current debian release (woody) works ABSOLUTELY finely for me. Its very stable. Of course, I can't boast to others about having the latest version of GEyeCandy but I really don't give a shit. If I want the latest version of a particular program I can upgrade it independently (and there are backports from sarge of several important programs available for woody. so you can't complain about X not working). No one is going to need the latest versions of EVERY fucking package in their distro. But in case you do, you can use testing. Its pretty stable. At least it's as stable as all those distros out there whose version numbers cannot be stored in a 32-bit ints.
IIRC, ubuntu uses the new debian-installer.
Gentoo has always allowed you to downgrade packages to any previous version. The revdep-rebuild script will even attempt to fix any broken dynamic linkage that might result.
will do the trick, and then you'll need to edit to mask versions newer than the old one you installed.I bet you're having fun with BSD if you missed such an obvious feature of Portage :D
Taking what you are saying a step further, why can't we just have a single distro? No we can't. The different free distros cater for different needs. Gentoo is for putting together a distro from the source. Debian is a distro with virtually all the apps out there and with a lot of ways to install the packages and supports many architectures. Fedora is for new users and people who want the latest eye candy apps. The commercial distros like SuSE and Mandrake *can* be unified but they're just in it for the money and they wont do it. Try convincing them.
Now, why can't we have a single package management system/installation system? Same reasoning - different distros do different things. You can't have a single package management system for both pre-compiled and source code distros without putting extra overhead on one of them. Same thing goes for installation system. And commercial distros just won't do it. Again, try convincing them.
(after you've chosen a boot often such as "vanilla" or "bf24" and then selected a language)
/proc/pci
ALT+F2
cat
voila! Hardware devices (well, PCI/AGP anyhow).
Debian:
"Stable". Apt-get is beautiful. jsut type in what you want ot get and you ahve it. Dependancies are always wonderful with this because it deals with it automaticly. The problem is if you use the stable package, be prepared to wait years for a new version of your software. I usually say testing for my install, so my things are relatively current, but not totally buggy. Not really for a total linux newbie, but if you are smart enough to understand basic computer things, you coudl get by.
Mandrake:
URMPI is like apt get, but from what I noticed, not with as many packages. Its my distro of choice at the moment. Things (NFS, SMB, SSH) just work, with minimal setup. If you are migrating, it's the best for that.
Redhat:
Good for enterprize. If you want basic office stuff, this is the distro for oyu. If yu want something any more then what is already on the disk, be prepared for dependancy issues (I knwo there is apt-get, but package selection is limited). Circular dependantcies are a pain in the ass (you want to install A, but can't because oyu need B, but you can't install B because oyu need C, and you can't install C, becasue you need A)
Something else:
Lycoris is another "mirgration" type of linux. The install even has a solitarie game for oyu to play while you wait. It's all dumbed down...I found that to be very limiting.
Slackware was my "first" distro when I was a linux virgin..and I sure promise yo if oyu make that your first distro, you will feel like a virgin. Pain in the ass. I lost many harddrives due to it. Lucky for me, the drives were small 500MBish drives on a 486.
KNoppix. TRy it first. If you can familiarize yourself with knoppix, it helps reduce the risk to your system from a bad install, and you can muck around with it without killing anything important.
Gentoo. Ricer jokes aside, it's a good distro if oyu need a special custom configuration...say if oyu have a 64 bit processor or something, otherwise, be prepared to spend hours and hours compiling linux. (I haven't used Gentoo, but this is what I heard).
There are other distros out there, you will probably install linux several times before oyu find the one that works for you.
http://distrowatch.com/ has a more complete list of distros.
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You remember correctly.
(installed it yesterday on my laptop, it included the new debian installer)
I like it because it doesn't overwhelm you with apps. And if you want to add something, just apt-get it (or better yet fire up Synaptic).
http://www.ubuntulinux.org
Go with Ubuntu. It's Debian based. Very easy to install and use. Check it out at http://www.ubuntulinux.org.
Of course, the package will be upgraded next time you do an upgrade, so to stop that, you can "hold" the package:
To undo that, you'd run:
Of course, fullscreen package management utilities like aptitude and Synaptic let you do the above with fewer keystrokes.
Alternatively, you can put something like the following into /etc/apt/preferences (see man apt_preferences for more details):
Hope that helps.
KDE 3.3.1 had just made the Sarge mirrors. I doubt they'd pull it out and go back to 3.2.3 for release.