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.'"

Comments

Debian has always been the best

[XMilkProject]

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.

Re:Debian has always been the best

[sameeer]

The ease of using Debian based systems in terms of installing software, and easy updates might be just the thing which'll boost linux to the desktops of the majority of computer users who do not want to learn or be exposed to the intricacies of the operating system before using it.. we shall have to just wait and see..

Debian in a Nutshell...

[Anonymous Coward]

...RTFM !!

Ah, it is still good though.

All I know is...

[TeachingMachines]

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!

Re:All I know is...

[misleb]

Eh?

apt-get install cupsys cupsys-driver-gimpprint cupsys-client cupsys-pt

http://localhost:631/

Login as root and setup a printer.

Or is the problem finding the right device to use?

-matthew

As interesting as the technology

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Other Distros

[IAAP]

FTFA:Many people actively involved with Debian development are working as system administrators themselves. Thus, they know very well what their own needs are, and in case Debian doesn't meet them, they are in the position to fix that. However, ideally, one should not have to be a Debian contributor to successfully deploy Debian in production environments.

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?

Re:Other Distros

[benjamindees]

is Debian more of an enterprise-admin friendly-scalable distro than, say, RedHat Enterprise?

It depends on your definition of "enterprise". And it really depends on the admin. For your typical, point-and-click, illiterate computer monkey "enterprise" admin who only knows enough to install updates, reinstall the entire OS, and call for outside help, RedHat is perfect. In fact, it appears that this is RedHat's primary market.

For admins who know what they're doing and can invest time in making their jobs easier and more productive, however, Debian is an absolute dream.

Re:Other Distros

[Kjella]

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.

Shhhhhhhh!!

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Debian rocks -- The book less so

[peeping_Thomist]

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?

Re:Debian rocks -- The book less so

[alfino]

I would love to hear suggestions as to what's missing. feedback at debianbook.info .

Great book, too bad about the software

[FishandChips]

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.

Re:Great book, too bad about the software

[Chalex]

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

This is the perfect example of not understanding "The Debian System". YOU aren't supposed to use unstable. You're not even supposed to use testing. If you don't want to have to fiddle with the system, use "stable". That's what it's for. This is clearly explained in a number of places in the documentation.

If you really want to use the latest software, why not use Ubuntu? They do all the fiddling for you.

Re:Great book, too bad about the software

[alfino]

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.

Re:Great book, too bad about the software

[FishandChips]

This is the perfect example of not understanding "The Debian System". YOU aren't supposed to use unstable. You're not even supposed to use testing. If you don't want to have to fiddle with the system, use "stable". That's what it's for. This is clearly explained in a number of places in the documentation.

Actually, that's the perfect example of why Debian doesn't work for everyone, for stictly my two cents. Not every user is in it to be hectored (an obsession with the Debian way, in full caps) or treated with disdain (must be too stupid to have read any documentation, etc.). Personally, I use Linux to get away from all that stuff about we own your ass so do what we say.

To answer another reply, I now use a mucho tweaked SuSE. Works for me. Any number of other distros, including Debian, may well work better for you, maybe more so now Martin Krafft has given everyone the gift of a full-up guide to Debian.

Re:Debian SUCKS on SPARC --- won't install, period

[raynet]

I have couple Sun Ultra 1 workstations and had no trouble installing Debian Linux (Sarge) on them. Just checked couple faqs and howtos to be sure my hardware was supported and how to change screen resolution and how to patch firmware to support 64-bit mode (though I think it was Solaris that required the firmware patch to even boot).

Either you did something wrong or just happened to have an SPARC that wasn't supported or tested.

Re:Debian SUCKS on SPARC --- won't install, period

[m50d]

I installed woody on an SS10 with no difficulty at all (It has no cdrom drive, so I couldn't (at that stage) install sarge directly). Then I just did a dist-upgrade to sarge, which requires a bit of jumping through hoops as both the kernel and libc need to be upgraded and either is incompatible with the other, but the procedure is clearly explained on the website and I managed it with few difficulties.

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.

The Community Sucks

[c_spencer100]

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.

Re:The Community Sucks

[Penguinisto]

...you've never owned a Mac before, have you?

/P (a Mac user who, umm, "occasionally" finds trouble with the zealotry of his Cupertino-facing brethren...)

Re:Debian SUCKS on SPARC --- won't install, period

[MacJedi]

debian:~> uname -a
Linux debian 2.4.26 #1 Sat May 1 18:58:40 EDT 2004 sparc64 GNU/Linux
debian:~> cat /proc/cpuinfo | head -n 1
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.

Re:yeah, but you can't really search for packages

[Grey Ninja]

I have an alias set up that allows searching from the command line quite easily.

alias s='apt-cache search --names-only'

Then, to look for something like... libvorbis, I would just have to do this:

s libvorbis

And it returns this:

libvorbis-dev - The Vorbis General Audio Compression Codec (development files)
libvorbis0a - The Vorbis General Audio Compression Codec
libvorbisenc2 - The Vorbis General Audio Compression Codec
libvorbisfile3 - The Vorbis General Audio Compression Codec
libvorbis-ocaml - OCaml bindings for vorbis library
libvorbis-ocaml-dev - OCaml bindings for the vorbis library
libvorbis-perl - Perl extension for Ogg Vorbis streams
libvorbisfile-ruby - Ogg Vorbis support library for Ruby
libvorbisfile-ruby1.6 - Ogg Vorbis support library for Ruby1.6
libvorbisfile-ruby1.8 - Ogg Vorbis support library for Ruby

Easy as pie.

Re:Huh?

[no reason to be here]

If Debian is so scalable, why does it take them so much longer than any other OS vendor to simply do a release?

1. scalability has nothing to do with release time.
2. the biggest OS vendors new OS longhorn is due out when, exactly? and how far past due?

just sayin'...

Modifying packages to conform to FHS = bad

[grosskur]

I was a Debian user for four years; I recently switched away because I got fed up with all the downstream futzing they do to their packages. I understand Debian's need to ensure high-quality packages, but making gratutious changes to package interfaces (e.g., moving and renaming files) just to conform to a hardline FHS policy is extremely detrimental in the long term.

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.

Re:Modifying packages to conform to FHS = bad

[cortana]

For example, how do we find libssl.so on an FHS-compliant system? Is it /usr/lib/libssl.so or /usr/local/lib/libssl.so, or even /opt/openssl/lib/libssl.so? The FHS ensures we will never have a simple, consistent name, like we would have if the package author madated it to be /package/host/openssl.org/openssl/libssl.so.

Bald erdash. Say you want to run a binary that declares in its DT_NEEDED that it requires SONAME libssl.so.0.9.7. ld-linux will consult ld.so.cache, which contains the mapping of DT_SONAME -> library files. As the user, I don't give a damn where libssl.so.0.9.7 actually lives--the dynamic loader takes care of that for me.

Contrast this with DJB's crackheaded /package system. My binary again has libssl.so.0.9.7 in DT_NEEDED. But now that there is no fixed set of directories for the loader to search for libraries; I am expected to edit /etc/ld.so.conf and re-run ldconfig every time I install a new library.

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... :)

Re:Modifying packages to conform to FHS = bad

[rekt]

i can't believe this is being moderated as Insightful. What are you mods thinking!?

i'm a huge fan of djb's work, and i use his software (and i use Debian), but quoting his theories about cross-platform compatibility as support for your argument is pretty weak. djb's strong suit is his technical and mathematical rigor, not his infamous interpersonal skills.

For those of us who maintain more than a handful of machines, cross-package similarity is a real and significant advantage:

• Just installed package foo, but don't really know quite how you might use it best? debian policy lets you confidently look in /usr/share/doc/foo and know that you'll find *something* that the package maintainer thought would be worth reading, even if it's only the changelog.
• package doesn't have a man page? thanks to policy, that's an actual bug, not just an inconvenience.
• need to understand exactly how service foo starts and stops? you can read /etc/init.d/foo
• where are the config files? you can find them in /etc/foo/
• and so on...

djb is right that cross-platform incompatibility is a significant hassle. But what's his solution to that? He invents a whole new filesystem standard (see "Filesystem layout" on this page)! I respect the man for his technical prowess. And i'll grant that his proposed scheme probably makes more technical sense than the FHS, when viewed in isolation.

But you don't achieve cross-platform compatibility through technical rigor. You achieve it through compromise, social and political consensus, transparency, legacy support, and published standards. The FHS currently represents all of those things, as does debian. In fact, that's why debian endorses, attempts to comply with, and contributes back to the FHS, because it is committed to cross-platform compatibility. djb's technical nit-picking, while usually a good thing, does him a disservice in this particular area, and debian gets it right.

Harsh

[dbcad7]

hmmm.. A story praising Debian, you post your agreement and praise, and you are modded troll ? Is there some bad history here or is this an attempt to stop discussion of what distro each person likes ? If it is trolling to state your Distro preference, then why post stories about a distro in the first place. sheesh