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The Debian System Explained
An anonymous reader writes "XYZComputing has a great interview with Martin F. Krafft, the author of "The Debian System". From the article: 'Despite Debian GNU/Linux's important role in today's computing environment, it is largely misunderstood and oftentimes even discounted as being an operating system which is exclusively for professionals and elite users. In this book Krafft, explains his concept of Debian, which includes not only the operating system but also its underpinnings. Debian is not only a robust and scalable Linux distribution, but it has many other features which are worth looking into, like its open development cycle and rigorous quality control.'"
I'll use nothing other than Debian and Debian Based distro's. Ubuntu and Kubuntu are nice, as they are based off debian, have the massive package base available, but also are updated a bit more often.
Big ones, small ones, some as big as yer 'ead!
Give 'em a twist, a flick o' the wrist...
Hmmmm... started using Slackware around '95, went through a few kernel revisions, then put computers on the back-burner for a while to investigate post-puberty options. So how old did that make him during his long time NT testing years? How do I sign my kids up for that sort of opportunity at age 11-13? Maybe there's a reason why "Microsoft had ignored every single one of my elaborate suggestions and wishlist reports in 4.0".
I'm sure he makes many important contributions but, wow, people tell me that I'm arrogant if I make an elaborate suggestion at 30.
fast as fast can be. you'll never catch me.
...RTFM !!
Ah, it is still good though.
Debian 3.1 is a dream. Easy to install, no more updating (except for security updates), and rock solid as my desktop OS. FreeBSD was similarly solid, but the package management and printer control for Debian is just so darned easy. Hats off to Debian!
The Death Penalty: Killing people to show others that killing people is wrong.
The organization is as interesting as the technology. Lots of people are willing to put in lots of volunteer time.
I wonder how long it will be before the business schools start to take notice of successful open source projects and learn a bit about management.
exept ... you didn't
Interesting. I went through the same linux phases...
slackware, red hat, suse and now debian. Looked at Gentoo a bit but stuck with Debian.
I'm not an admin - outside of my own hacking at home. But, help me out here, is Debian more of an enterprise-admin friendly-scalable distro than, say, RedHat Enterprise?
From what I've seen between various distros(No Debian), there's their add-ons (desktop add-ins, installation software, etc...), and then there's just Linux, XFree86, and all of the GNU software stuff. Is Debian that much better whe it comes for day to day operations?
Knoppix is the best tool with which to showcase Debian-based systems. No installation/configuration required. Along with Ubuntu, it is quite possibly the easiest-to-use linux out there.
There are no uninteresting things. There are only uninterested people.
From TFA:
"And because everything is designed with little pieces building on top of each other, it's easy to keep an overview. This directly translates into manageability and security. In other words, you control the system, and not the other way around."
In Redmond, Washington the system controls YOU.
Now excuse me while I get my asbestos suit.
Don't tell everyone how AMAZING Debian is, please! I get this strange (probably very sick) psychological aversion to seeing things I feel are part of my ingroup assets become popular. As a Debian user of 7 or 8 years I get a little nervous at this. My choice of (vastly superior) operating system is what makes me feel different. Have a little mercy on a nerds elitist insecurities please! Im the guy who always discovered underground bands years ahead of everyone else, and when they finally became mainstream I wanted to disown them. My 'discovery' felt _violated_ by the hoards of unwashed sheep jumping on the wagon. 20 years as a 'geek' and now I hear that 'geek is chic'. Time to become a merchant banker. Stop following me around you horrible unoriginal soulless people!! Find something of your own. Debian is the best kept secret in the world to me right now, don't go around telling the oiks all about it or they'll hijack it, misrepresent it, and corrupt it by dragging it down to the lowest common denomiator like everything else they touch. Next thing I know some techno wannabe will be coming up to me in the street and saying "Hey, have you heard about this really awesome new operating system called Debian Linux!" ....Smack!!
Windows is the choice people! Windows is the best, trust me. Debian is rubbish!
It really is too bad that Martin Krafft fails to explain how to install the SPARC port of Debian. The last time I tried this, I had dug through the relevant portion of his book, and had it open next to me.
His description went wide of the mark quite quickly, and became totally useless shortly thereafter.
The install failed, of course. The OS went in, but the system went into spin-lock upon bootup attempt. That was about the third staight install failure for Debian 3.0r1 SPARC (each one burning 10 to 15 hours of my time), and it was the one which finally snapped my patience.
The SPARC32 gear of a dozen years ago was put together quite well, even if it isn't nearly as speedy as recent Intel kit. Even after the processors have been changed out for faster aftermarket Ross Hypersparcs.
Too bad that no Linux distro has supported it for half a decade. Yeah, catcalls, mudgobs, and rotting veggies also go out to RedRat, SuSE, and Mandrake.
And it's really too bad that Debian wastes our bloody time by pretending to support SPARC hardware.
I'm waiting for the first "BSD is dead" troll to show up. I can really use the bellylaugh. Because installing OpenBSD/SPARC32 on one of those old systems is a complete slam-dunk. Stock processors or Hypersparcs, single-proc or dual.
This sort of thing reminds me of Joel Spolski's opinion on advertising:
The idea of advertising is to lie without getting caught. Most companies, when they run an advertising campaign, simply take the most unfortunate truth about their company, turn it upside down ("lie"), and drill that lie home
If Debian is so scalable, why does it take them so much longer than any other OS vendor to simply do a release? How comes the software even in the "unstable" version is so often out of date? If it's so robust, how comes that shortly after their last stable release it was revealed that their entire security infrastructure revolved around one man, and that when he went on holiday the flow of updates simply stopped?
It seems to me that if you wished to advertise Debian, scalability and robustness would be the last qualities you'd choose to highlight. Instead you might want to focus on its dedication to the ideals of free software (that doesn't entice many people to install it though ...) or the fact that it runs on so many CPU architectures (hmm ... ditto). Actually, I can't think of any compelling reasons for the majority to run Debian directly. I say this even though I use Debian on my own server .... the original reasoning for this was that I felt at least the community was big and stable so there would be a reliable supply of security updates. That was before I found out about the size of their security team and the bandwidth bottlenecks on their servers (eg, Xfree update). After that I found myself wishing I'd installed Red Hat instead.
I guess many people agree with me because these days I see very few people advertising Debian as the Wonder OS that it was promoted as when I first got into Linux. These days people tend to promote it by pointing to the (significantly more popular) operating systems built upon it, like Ubuntu or Knoppix. Of course, it's not exactly great PR to promote yourself as the base for what are effectively (policy and project-wise) forks, but marketing was never Debians strong point ...
I really miss swaret --search when I'm in ubuntu on my friends pc. It's a major pain having to know the exact name of a package.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I've been using only Debian for about 5 years. It's the best. I totally support the community, and the philosophy behind Debian. Debian Stable is great for some purposes, and Debain unstable is great for others.
I've been reading Martin's book (it cost me $30), and unless the second half has a lot more in it than the first half does, there's not much there that an experienced user of Debian doesn't already know. So if you're already an experienced Debian user, the news is good: you already probably understand a lot more than you think you do! If you're not already experienced with Debian, what are you waiting for?
Anything worth doing is worth doing badly -- G.K. Chesterton
Kudos to Martin Krafft for writing his book. Many dream but few ever get it together ...
That said, I spent most of 2005 running Debian Unstable and Debian Testing on different systems and ended up finding both overrated and generally a disappointmennt. Debian was too demanding of time and needed seemingly endless fiddling around and careful management. It also took a lot of time to set up, though admittedly that is a one-off when an installation is still fresh. More important, the Debian developer community seemed shot through with an obsession with doing things the Debian way, with college-level debates (aka rows), with considerable disdain for new users and with frankly pretty obscure things of little interest to many in the everyday world. Overall, I began to wonder if some of these guys would recognize an end-user if they fell over one and my faith in the Debian way rapidly dwindled.
None of this should detract from Krafft's achievement, though. It's a heck of a good thing to have done. I do find it a little odd that he should recommend that new users try Ubuntu rather than Debian. One is tempted to ask: what's the problem whereby they can't use Debian, then?
For myself, I've now gone back to another distro. It's pretty nearly as capable as Debian, with the difference that its devs are technical experts who confine themselves to delivering what works. A distro that puts out for its users without striking tiresome poses or co-opting its users into politics of some kind is much the more preferable, for me at least.
Las qué passoun
tournoun pas maï
Debian 3.1 is really great. True, they have taken a long time to make this release but as I see it it is a great OS for the server. I am running it on my server and very happy with almost no fiddling I had to do with it. However, trying to run it on my workstation was a different story. Mainly because of all the wifi issues I ran into. But that is not solely debian's problem. Fedora had the same issue. So if you are looking for something rock solid for your server, go with debian. If you want something on your workstation supporting tons of new new hardware and offer opportunity for endless finddling, go with Fedora Core 4. Just my 2 cents.
I've never had anything against Debian itself. My problem, as with a lot of other people, was always the arrogance that just seemed to ooze from the average Debian user. If you don't know what I'm refering to, then you probably relatively new to the Linux Community. It seemed for the longest that every question posted on every forum yielded the answer "get Debian". Debian's problem was NEVER being misunderstood - it was being misrepresented by the zealots that actually think their pretentous attitude represents the Debian Community as a whole.
That I can agree to, on most BSD's (I have 5.2 humming along on an old Netra t1 105 sitting next to my elbow - testing is a breeze on it). --BUT-- That said, FreeBSD 6 on an old Sparc sure is cranky when it smacks right into an old school HME interface...
Would this mean that BSD support is slipping too? dunno.
/P
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
It's much easier task to have good quality control if you only include old versions of all software. This is like cheating to me...
Now try Ubuntu: good quality control while at the same time keeping up-to-date software in the distribution. Now _that_ is something to brag about!
Gustavo J.A.M. Carneiro
Ubuntu Breezy Beaver 5.10
I switched to it from RHEL4 and FC4 on a Dell Latitude D610 and was *very* pleasantly with the sound/wifi/video/multimedia taht all worked with minimal (ie: NONE) hassles out of the box.
I've run into far too many Debian users who have contempt for anyone who knows less than them that I have to assume it's an integral part of Debian culture. I would never recommend Debian for anyone who isn't an expert. If you like Debian anyway, and want to gain the best parts of Debian, recommend that mere users use Ubuntu.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
I actually use Mac OS X and don't use gentoo so please don't say I'm a zealot. But... the only distro that makes sense to use in my mind for GNU/Linux is a source based distro such as gentoo because its all about freedom right, so why would you use a pre-packaged distro? Using gentoo you can practically exercise your freedoms, along with sourcemage and others. Furthermore when using binary packages you can never know what that package does, so unless you compile it yourself you can't be sure. Wait. Actually Ken Thomson or someother wrote about how you can't trust compilers because they can interject code into your binaries. So really you can't trust any programs. Which is why the "GNU is more secure" mantra is patently false. Stop being paranoid Mr. Stallman and just suck it up. Debian could have backdoors too.
So in the end use Debian if you want a 2 year old system made of binaries that you can't trust, or use a source distro which you also can't trust (at least your exhibiting your freedom in that case). Personally I choose OS X.
What about usb wifi devices? Notably linksys instant wireless 802.11b ones?
There is talk right now how Firefox 1.5 isnt out on Ubuntu because Debian firefox is still at 1.0.7. And debian doesnt know when they will even get 1.5 in testing!
So, big problem if multiple distro's are waiting on the primary distro for a package with only 2 guys maintaining it, and they have been MIA.
I used Debian prior to using Slackware (which I use still). Apt-get was what really impressed me. Any package I wanted automatically got its necessary dependancies fulfilled. What disappointed me was the age of the software. For example, I couldn't get XFCE 4.2 on Debian 3.1 simply because the software testing is SO rigorous. Works without any problems on Slackware; don't see what Debian's problem is.
Cross-platform compatibility is essential. If the upstream Apache maintainers say Apache can be stopped with apachectl stop, Debian should damn well support this interface. I don't care if they provide /etc/init.d/httpd stop in addition, but they should support the standard interface. This makes life infinitely simpler for people who deal with many different systems---they don't have to keep relearning things. It also makes things simpler for people offering support to Apache users.
The tremendous benefits of cross-platform compatibility come from a package's interface being exactly the same on every system. It is a relatively minor benefit for different packages to have similar interfaces. Breaking cross-platform compatibility, as Debian does, for the sake of cross-package similarity is a horrible idea.
I should point out that I'm picking on Debian here because they are especially bad about this, but almost every major Linux distribution is guilty of unncessarily violating cross-platform compatibility in some way.
I've had Ubuntu installed for ages--installation went smooth as butter--on a second 250GB hard drive with 200G of NTFS scratch space (for use by my first hard drive's Windows installation). I've heard some very good things about Debian and, as I've had a few issues with Ubuntu (can't seem to install the video drivers correctly, though I've heard this is a problem specifically with the Hoary release--stuck at a blurry non-native resolution--largely I just want something somewhat more bare bones), I've spent some time trying to overwrite the existing Linux installation with Sarge Debian, only to find that it just. will. not. do. it. The installer can't mount the second hard drive. period. It'll mount the first and primary (NTFS-formatted, Windows booting) hard drive just fine and offer to overwrite the whole shebang, but even disconnecting that hard drive and connecting the second as the only and primary device, it can't mount the thing. Googling, reading TFM, etc. all seem to provide some promising leads as far boot paramters, etc.,but nothing seems to pan out. My working theory is that the 2.4 kernel just can't mount a drive of that size (there seems to be evidence to support this on older versions of 2.4, 2.4.12 and earlier, I belive, though I imagine that Sarge would be using the latest available release), and that this explains the disparity between the 2.6-based Ubuntu installation and the 2.4 Debian non-installation. Although I'd really like to give this "dream OS" a shot, I'm very tempted to skip it and just go with Gentoo, especially since it's alleged to have a very good build for AMD64. Insight from the
good quality control while at the same time keeping up-to-date software in the distribution
;)
Here's a perfect that totally disproves that statement:
I used Ubuntu 5.10 for a few months. The problem with Breezy Badger is the version of Firefox that ships with it is just awful. Aside from the terrible memory leak, it randomly segfaults on different links. Here's the problem: Ubuntu won't backport 1.5 to Breezy Badger. Why? Because that repository that they're always bragging on kicks you in the teeth. All those plugin packages are broken by the upgrade to Firefox 1.5. In fact, since the upgrade breaks so many packages (somewhere in the neighborhood of 50), Firefox 1.5 won't be backported. All this just to upgrade a simple browser. Don't waste your time reporting the bug to Firefox, because they'll quickly close your thread and tell you that it's fixed in trunk. Of course you could easily install it yourself, but isn't package upgrade and availbilty one of Ubuntu's biggest selling points?
ps. Is that how CmdrTaco wanted us to link to stories
I completely agree with Krafft on everything he says in the interview (at least the stuff I understand). I am not a developer nor great coder. I am only a Debian user, but my first install was Slink and I have been seriously into Debian since Potato.
Don't get me wrong, I hate Debian, but only because it is the only OS installed on my machines. I couldn't live with the rest, because they are far worse than Debian. IMHO Sarge went a little downhill, there were some rough edges during release. For example the security team in reality only existed of Joey (met that guy a couple month ago, he is smaller in real live), but that was just one of the obvious things. If you do a lot of administration for both Potato and Sarge (yes Potato still runs happily on many machines, not only on mine) you know what I mean.
I didn't know there was so much trouble with Ubuntu/Canonical, but as Debian and/or Ubuntu developers they ought to know better. For some reason many people want/ed to make Debian more "desktop/user friendly" (shudder), whatever they mean by it. I think the idea and philosophy of Debian is perfect for what it is and I really hope the people that were in Debian and thought so left for Ubuntu. Ubuntu is great in itself.
RTFM!!! it is great
after experimenting with several distros on my laptop, mepis (debian-based) has been the only one to get my wifi working straight out of the box.
and with mepis, you get the lovely advantage of using debian package management (which means near-amazing software access) without having to download 14 iso's. actually, using mepis has made me a debian fan.
but when will debian put out their own self-contained one or two disc version? i think that alone would win users to the cause, and maybe silence some who might say debian is just a "good base" to spin other distros off of.
I do believe one can trust an open source program. If you don't like what's going on, why don't you take a peak into the source... That being said, Gentoo is my distro of choice. Apt is nothing compared to Portage. If you have the 3 days it takes to install, it's definately worth it to spend that time setting up a nice gentoo system. Debian is nice, but I really only need it when I need to get a server up and running in under two hours. I recommend it to new linux converts since the set up is highly automatic and it's really easy to use.
waiting for ad.doubleclick.net
ndiswrapper? Although breezy does ship with an ancient version and I had serious difficulties getting anything more recent to compile even after installing gcc 3.4. Dapper comes with 1.5 at the mo, but it's obviously a moving target and not recommended for serious use yet.
I don't know... mine was a Intel mini-PCI card using the ipw2200 driver..
Thank God somebody else finds this to be the case. So I'm not a complete idiot after all. (or at least not the only complete idiot.) Thank you. I got my printer to work but only in some kind of half arsed crippled kind of way. It is an HP and supposed to be fully supported. Feh!
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Debian was actually the only Linux I could get to work on my Blade 100. I had to do the netboot install but it worked almost as easy as an Ubuntu install. Works great.
"What was Linux like in the early 1990's Daddy?"
"Install Debian stable son, see for yourself."
I would like to congratulate Mr. Krafft for homing in on a critical issue; that is, how to maximize and focus the efforts of people working on all of these various distributions, especially the ones that are derived from Debian, to benefit a main project. As an editor I know that 90% of the work in publishing is in achieving the last 5% of perfection. To my mind, the open source movement needs to polish one beautiful gem and give it to the world. Do that and astonishing things will happen. Take Firefox for example. But it appears to my inexperienced eye that a lot of effort is being distributed across a very wide field.
I confess that am new to the Linux world, but an old hand at computing. I successfully installed Gentoo on an old PIII as my first Linux project. I am glad I began with that difficult manual installation as I learned a tremendous amount. I did a lot of stuff with the command line, but wanted to see the GUI. Of course I could have installed a GUI environment under Gentoo, but I was curious to try something new.
The next distribution I tried was Debian. I loved its automatic installation, especially appreciated after my experiences with Fastab, Grub, and the rest. Some irritations with the printing system aside, I was impressed by the stability and completeness and professional look this system displayed under Gnome or KDE. And the galaxy of software available is astonishing. It left me with no doubt that sooner or later open source software will leave the server farm and be the norm on the desktop, at least in some computing environments. It seems to me particularly suited to educational environments, because only open source allows students to legally take apart their tools and see how they work. But I digress.
When I saw how many different distributions there are while doing a bit of research looking for a distribution for another old computer http://distrowatch.com/ I became concerned. Put plainly it seems to me that there are too many chiefs and not enough indians.
Hopefully Mr. Krafft's work can harness all of this creative energy and focus some of it back into some center or other. From my limited experience the Debian distribution seems very well suited as a candidate to champion.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
I love my macs and your comment is so true...
This is a difficult question. I learnt a lot of technical stuff about the Debian system, but I cannot identify "the most important thing," so I'll have to look elsewhere: the community. I definitely learnt that my initial plans to "write a book about Debian" wouldn't have worked without the countless folks who helped out.
... btw, doesn't learn/learned look weird? Shouldn't it be Lurn/Lurned?
OMFG! I don't know if I should smash the article's author's head in with a shovel or the actual author of the book for using the "word" learnt!!! It is LEARNED, as in I LEARN in school, and I use what I LEARNED in my current career choice.
flame me for spelling or grammar typos, i dont care, this is just my own rant against whoever it is who allowed the word "learnt" into such a decent article!
- You're not paranoid, they really are after you.
I've used Debian for 5+ years, not just on a desktop but also as the basis of the distributed system of a medium-sized research laboratory. I've been mostly happy, but I'm becomming restless. Yeah, apt-get is really cool, but what about...
/etc/init.d/ scripts: Debian doesn't have a nice way to turn these scripts on and off and monitor their status via a command-line tool. Red Hat's system here was very good.
user management: I use LDAP for user management; others use SAMBA and other stuff. But adduser isn't a shim that can interface to any of these back-end data-stores -- it can only do /etc/passwd.
ideology: Debian's ideological bent can be a real pain for those us using the distro for its technical merits. For example, Debian pulled SSL support from all the GPL network services that link to libssl in a fit of ideology that no other distro has had.
package management: Yeah, apt-get's dependency resolution logic is very cool. Other aspects of the system aren't so cool. Apt-get, aptitude, and other front-ends don't share the same back-end data-store, so if you mix and match these tools, you get inconsistent package data. And it's nearly impossible to force-remove a package (just delete all the damn files and forget about it!) if the associated removal script fails.
You can test the compiler's trustworthiness.
http://www.acsa-admin.org/2005/abstracts/47.html
Countering Trusting Trust through Diverse Double-Compiling
David A. Wheeler
Institute for Defense Analyses
USA
An Air Force evaluation of Multics, and Ken Thompson's famous Turing award lecture "Reflections on Trusting Trust," showed that compilers can be subverted to insert malicious Trojan horses into critical software, including themselves. If this attack goes undetected, even complete analysis of a system's source code will not find the malicious code that is running, and methods for detecting this particular attack are not widely known. This paper describes a practical technique, termed diverse double-compiling (DDC), that detects this attack and some unintended compiler defects as well. Simply recompile the purported source code twice: once with a second (trusted) compiler, and again using the result of the first compilation. If the result is bit-for-bit identical with the untrusted binary, then the source code accurately represents the binary. This technique has been mentioned informally, but its issues and ramifications have not been identified or discussed in a peer-reviewed work, nor has a public demonstration been made. This paper describes the technique, justifies it, describes how to overcome practical challenges, and demonstrates it.
Try Corewar @ www.koth.org - rec.games.corewar
I can't seem to find 3.1 version's graphics's installer anywhere !
It says "Removed because..."
Any idea where else i can find the 3.1 graphical installer (even if only beta/alpha?)
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
It largely shows you what is behind debian and how it is made up. It really gives you a sneak peak of what the inner-core of the debian community is like. I liked the one chapter that shows a map of how a program gets turned into a debian package. It shows what steps are done manually and what is done automatically with scripts. The book also goes into detail on debian-specific user an developer tools.
My lasting impression is that the book reveals how a tight developer and package maintainer community is really what delivers such a great product. If you have no interest in this topic, this book is not for you.
This is what I got from packages.debian.org
/. reader is installing Debian !
"packages.debian.org is down at the moment due to performance issues.
We apologize for any inconvenience and hope to have service restored as soon as possible."
It looks like every
It's been like that for weeks..
I have guides to setting up Debian desktop systems that describe which packages to choose for various desktop tasks and how to configure them, for Debian 3.1 Sarge and for Debian Testing.
And a similar guide for a Debian server.
An Air Force evaluation of Multics, and Ken Thompson's famous Turing award lecture "Reflections on Trusting Trust," showed that compilers can be subverted to insert malicious Trojan horses into critical software, including themselves......This paper describes the technique, justifies it, describes how to overcome practical challenges, and demonstrates it.
This paper is full of it.
The technique is possible, but so impractical as to be completely useless.
Modern compliers aren't actually that advanced. their optimisation capabilites only go so far due to their poor ability to interpret the application. As such, I seriously doubt that compiler trojans are in any way a serious threat. The threat from actual trojans in binaries if far, far, far greater.
May the Maths Be with you!
The Debian System Explained:
Utter shit.
They're backticks, not opening quotes. Why do UNIX nerds insist on playing at typographers like ``this''?
It looks CRAP. This is not an xterm.
Use a double quote mark ".
Do it in assembly language- that would certainly be unique.
But not very portable #:-(
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
I am obviously the wrong sort of geek to enjoy this. All I could think of was Star Trek...
Not, apachectl. I will never understand the hatred the Debian guys have for the standard way of doing things. What do they gain from trying to force the rest of the world to call httpd by the name apache. It's breaks a lot of scripts, and it's very hard to remember when you're on a normal system versus a Debian proprietary system so you know what to type.
Why not just go with stright-up debian?
If you have broadband, I would recomend the 100mb download. Upgrade the kernel, and change to testing or unstable, if you like. Then if you want a gui, do an apt-get x-window-system, and an apt-get icewm (or whatever) and you're in business. Have the system set up just for what you want, and no cruft.
It is a bit of work, but it's educational. And once you have you installation, you may never need to re-install, just keep upgrading.
check out this site http://debian.home.pipeline.com/ for an updated Debian packaging diagram (soon to be in pt_BR). -Kev
You don't know your history.
"Reflections on Trusting Trust
Ken Thompson
Reprinted from Communication of the ACM, Vol. 27, No. 8, August 1984, pp. 761-763."
http://www.acm.org/classics/sep95/
"Again, in the C compiler, Figure 5 represents the high-level control of the C compiler where the routine "compile" is called to compile the next line of source. Figure 6 shows a simple modification to the compiler that will deliberately miscompile source whenever a particular pattern is matched. If this were not deliberate, it would be called a compiler "bug." Since it is deliberate, it should be called a "Trojan horse." "
Yes, this is the exact paper Wheeler (and probably the great grandparent, implicitly) refers to. Yes, it was in 1984. Yes it was practical enough back then that it was actually done. Yes, it would still be practical today.
Note that this is not what Wheeler's paper is about. Wheeler's paper is about knowing when such a trojan has been implanted in the binary compiler (which then propagates it whenever it compiles itself).
Try Corewar @ www.koth.org - rec.games.corewar
I used to use Debian Sid, but I am a Kubuntu converted. For the last three years, when I want to setup a printer, I go to the "System Configuration" app (was "control panel" or something before, but...), click on the "printers" icon (under the "hardware" title), see the now-installed printers, click on "add new printer", fill out the needed info (it even searches for printers in a Windows network for me), print a test page and voila. In the same applet, I can pause or delete a job, configure printer parameters, etc... what is so difficult?
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
The automatic stuff in system config did not work properly. Ultimately I was able to get a driver loaded and print. I have an older MB on my machine and parralel printing. Anyway, it is no big deal. Just a bit of a hair puller. Glad your experience was more standard. Most have no problems. Just downloaded the Kubuntu iso as it turns out. Will overwrite current system. Trying to find a distro that likes my setup. If it works better I'll repost. Could be a while. Cheers, B
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy