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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...
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.
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
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?
Well-tested, stable packages with no dependency issues or known security bugs and security patches, yes. Proprietary tools? No. Debian strictly follows the Debian Free Software Guidelines, which means that anything in their distro any other distro could just take. I can't really speak for everything you need in an enterprise setup but as a home server & remote X desktop it is excellent.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Debian installs fine on my Sparcs, but Linux kernel crashes on Sparc. Debian patch or vanilla tarball, you can get the kernel to shit within 30 minutes of running crashme. Try it.
OpenBSD is much better for these old Sparcs, hopefully the MP will come up to scratch for the MBus boxes.
POKE 36879,8
I have since installed gentoo, using the standard install process, and it's worked pretty much perfectly - only gripe I have is it won't automatically generate an initrd with the right scsi modules like it can on x86, but I can live with that. So much for no linux distro having supported it for half a decade - I don't think gentoo's even been around that long.
I am trolling
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.
Linux debian 2.4.26 #1 Sat May 1 18:58:40 EDT 2004 sparc64 GNU/Linux
debian:~> cat
cpu : TI UltraSparc IIi (Sabre)
I'm not saying that your problems aren't real, but Debian certainly supports Sparc and in my experience, it does so very well. I've had nothing but great success with Debian and Sparc, including the installer. Perhaps you should consider filing a bug report with the Debian Installer team. The architectures which have fewer users, receive fewer bug reports. How can you expect them to fix a bug they may not know exists?
As an aside, there is a good chance Sparc will be cut from Etch, so you may not have to worry about Debian "pretending to support SPARC hardware" in the future.
2^5
> 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?
I try to answer this question in the introduction of my book, section "Target audience". You can obtain the first chapter from http://debiansystem.info/about . Now I hope you guys aren't going to kill my server.
echo mailto: !#^."<*>"|tr "<*> mailto:" net@madduck
Then, to look for something like... libvorbis, I would just have to do this:
And it returns this:
Easy as pie.
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
One thing I did not specify -- as I did not mention Ubuntu in the introduction:
I recommend Ubuntu to new users of Linux because in my experience, most of them were just that: new users who wanted to read their email, author documents, and use their laptops power management at night. Sure, all of this is very possible with Debian, but IME not really for the newbie.
Here, Ubuntu has done a good job at making Debian more accessible. That is all. And being accessible to the Linux newbie just isn't "Debian's place" IMHO. We make a stable operating system that is a reliable tool for those who know how to use it. We don't want bells and whistles and lots of automatic stuff making it easier for the new users.
I would not recommend Ubuntu to someone who has the potential to climb the curve quickly. And of the dozens of people I've switched to Linux/Ubuntu in the past months, most have already switched to Debian. I think that's a natural thing to do as you exceed the offerings of Ubuntu, which is am operating system that trades much flexibility for the tight integration and beautification it has.
Anyway, to each their own. Going for Ubuntu is probably not a mistake. Heading right for Debian isn't either, but you're in for some more work.
echo mailto: !#^."<*>"|tr "<*> mailto:" net@madduck
1.5 is in unstable already, which means it'll soon trickle into testing. It also means that the next Ubuntu release in April will have it.
echo mailto: !#^."<*>"|tr "<*> mailto:" net@madduck
Wish I was Debian-Guru enough to help you with all of your problems, but i'll say a few things.
Ubuntu is basically Debian, so I don't know if I would do a clean install to switch. If your having performance problems make sure your not using the default kernel that installs, go ahead and use APT to upgrade to the 686 or K7 kernel to take advantage of your CPU. It should be very easy to do.
What graphics card do you have that is giving you trouble? If it's ATI I can probably help.
Regarding Gentoo, it's a very interesting way to go. It requires a bit more time and tech-savvy though. Compiling everything from scratch will yeild better performance (if you know what your doing) and Gentoo is over all a very nice distro (if you can call it a Distro). Portage is very slick. I usually reserve Gentoo for hardware that I really want to squeeze every last bit of performance out of.
If its an ATI card your having trouble with, hit up my site (click my nick) and use the feedback form to send me an email.
Big ones, small ones, some as big as yer 'ead!
Give 'em a twist, a flick o' the wrist...
Yes. A 2.6 installation kernel is available for Sarge but it isn't made very obvious. The initial root selection menu will give you a listing of the available boot images if you ask for it. I think it is INSTALL_26. I got stuck by this on my Sarge install when I ended up with a hardware incompatability under 2.4 and had to restart the whole process.
This is important if you want to compile your own 2.6 kernel later since there a lot of 2.4 specific packages (modutils, etc.) that you won't be able to use if you don't install with 2.6 from the start.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
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
Relax, the only regular files under /usr/share/qt3 are arch-independent. Most of the files in there are symbolic links to the files' proper locations, presumably for the benefit of broken software/users who demand that everything lives in one directory. :)
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.
Contrast this with DJB's crackheaded
An alternative is to forsake the shared library cache alltogether, and maintain an ever-growing collection of PATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, etc, environmental variables. If I enjoyed hammering nails through my dick in this way, I'd swich to Solaris where this insanity seems to be accepted.
Hey, maybe I should I just switch to Windows, where the solution to this problem is for every app to ship private copies of the shared libraries that it requires in the same directory as its binaries, wasting disk space and causing uncounted security problems...
?