Slashdot Mirror
A Look at Debian Etch Beta 3
An anonymous reader writes "The All about Linux blog has a down-to-earth review of the latest Linux offering from Debian — Etch Beta 3 which optionally sports a very intuitive GUI installer. The review looks ar the pros and cons of Debian Etch Beta 3 as well as what the Debian team could do to make this not-for-profit Linux distribution even more popular."
It's nice to see Etch moving closer towards release, it's been too long since Sarge imo. Although there's a new shiny installer which seems to give lots of (easy) control over how you set up your system, there seems little else other than updated packages. This might not be a bad thing however, if the time taken between the Sarge release and this one has been put into making a generally rock solid distro. For many people, being able to rely on having no stability problems is very important. So I think Debian should stick to this path. Moving towards making it user friendly for the linux newbie as the article suggests isn't a good plan unless they have devs sitting around with nothing to do. There are plenty of distros out there which provide for these people (e.g. Ubuntu).
I'm a debian user. I'm not trying to troll. But, it's the same damn installer. The questions are the same and the layout is practically the same. The X-based installer is just as (but no more) intuitive than the curses installer.
Badass Resumes
It's *not* beta 3, it's D-I beta 3. There's a difference.
Thanks to a bug in base-config in sarge, apt-setup lines are created as testing. You either end up with a case of Frankenserver, or if you dist-upgrade, a complete etch install.
This was fixed in base-config 2.66 in June 2005. It's too bad that base-config remained at 2.53.10 for both sarge r1 in December 2005 and sarge r2 in April 2006.
In other words, anyone who installed Debian sarge and blindly did apt-get update; apt-get upgrade unknowingly upgraded themselves to etch, except for packages that required dist-upgrade or manual installation (i.e. kernels).
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Back in the day, Linux installers truly suffered from complexity and other ailments. This was one of the reasons that turned people away from running Linux. Recently, many graphical updates have cured Linux of these ailments. IMO I think that the current debian installer is perfectly fine. While I understand that there is always room for impovement, perhaps it is time that distros moved on to tackle other problems that prevent people from using Linux more commonly such as wireless support.
Klingon Software is not released, it escapes, inflicting terrible damage onto the enemy as it does
The questions are the same and the layout is practically the same. The X-based installer is just as (but no more) intuitive than the curses installer.
That might be because computer set up is not intuitive. Device drivers, naming conventions and file system arrangement follow few conventions and there are many correct combinations. Worse, the user is at their ISP or network administrator's mercy for almost all of the network set up.
What Debian's installer has always done is inform. The Debian install is one of the most informative of Linux installs outside of Gentoo. It tells you what it's doing, offers hints for common situations and tells you where you need information from someone else.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
This is a beta. The button is there so if the GUI installer throws something funny on your face you can hit that button and submit the screenshot with a bug report.
Calling this a beta is misleading. Etch is currently the Debian 'testing' distro, which means it is undergoing constant, incremental updating. All the people that complain about the slow release cycle, or expect the packages included in this 'beta' review to be the same as what you'll download tomorrow, don't understand how Debian works.
The time between stable releases is indeed quite long, but when a new app version is released by the upstream developers it often appears in Debian unstable within a day or two, and from there into testing in the space of a few weeks. Which means you can have a (slightly) unstable Debian system that is at most days behind the most cutting edge distro, or an almost rock-solid Debian 'testing' system that is rarely more than a month behind. You're only stuck with the two year release cycle if you cannot tolerate any problems whatsoever. And if you are working on something that critical, you shouldn't be going anywhere near applications with less than 10 days of field-testing (the minimum to pass from unstable to testing) anyways, regardless of which distro you run.
yp.
That's what I love about Debian. It's wonderfully easy to optimise the package combinations. You could probably get it down even further, if you use the deborphan command to figure out all "leaf" packages (i.e packages that aren't dependencies for others). Then you can cull down the ones you don't want, rerun deborphan again, rinse and repeat. Also very useful for culling bloat in the system, from extra software installed over time.
This has to be the one myth about Debian that has almost every other Linux user suckered.
For these people, here is a rundown of the many different faces of Debian. You can choose four different types of Debian:
Then, as if that wasn't enough, you can selectively include packages from all four distributions, by specifying a default dist, and specifically apt-getting from one of the four. Personally, that's what I do on my machine, using 'testing' as a base. I've also been known to set this up on some servers I maintain, if they desperately need a newer php or something like that. Works like a charm.
So as you can see, Debian can change rapidly. Very rapidly. It all depends on what you choose. It's just that the Debian "releases" are always of the 'stable' distribution. Hence this common misconception.
OK, it's nice to see someone trying to give an even handed approach to a distro. But I think there are a few points that could be improved upon.
In the end there are some comments about the Debian web site regarding the use of weblogs for technical support and a cleaner site so you can find the razor sharp release of etch.
Weblogs for technical support suck. There are better ways of doing it. I have found mailing lists to be far superior to web logs for the simple reason that they are more accessabble, easier to read (no ads, no extra content fighting for your attentions) and above all else, filterable by machines and humans based on content, writer, and subject. Weblogs are for little people who want to talk about support, not get it. Yes, I'm very opinionated about this. I've yet to have a good experience with weblogs and technical support.
Debian Etch 3 is not for the new user. If it was, it would be called stable. Yet everyone insists on reviewing this one. The fact that it's harder to find from the debian front page is a good thing. I would not want to have to support something that hasn't yet been released. Similarly, expert mode is not for the faint of heart. Making a comment that it would be nice to provide more information for the new user in expert mode's use of FSCK is retarded. expertmode it not intended for the new user -- don't expect it to be.
Why does everyone have to review the installation process itself? Sure, it's the first introduction to the OS and that means something. But everyone makes such a big deal about nice looking gui installers. What's the value in a gui installer versus a curses based installer when you are trying to get the job done. I'm sure Debian will benefit greatly because of this but in reality it's not a requirement to getting the job done.
All that said, I would like to see reviews done not on the first 5 minutes of use of a distro but based on the first 90 days or 12 months of use on a distro. This is were it matters most. These 5 minute reviews are like a one night stand. You won't really know what you have landed until you see the make-up come off.
I have to confess, I'm a fan of Debian. Never tried Unbuntu. But I've tried Gentoo, RedHat, and Suse 9. After using these for 18 months I dropped them all and went back to Debian. That's my idea of a review. I had to use the things for a long period of time and live with their decisions long enough to understand what they were doing and not doing well.
Gentoo -- not my favorite. I like the idea behind it, but they have this uncanny ability during upgrades to allow the user to do amazingly stupid things based on stupid ideas to begin with. I trashed my fstab file based on an upgrade from gentoo. Why would the distro EVER consider upgrading a file like fstab? Really, if there's any reason why a working system should have one of it's most critical files ever considered as upgradable I would love to hear it. This is just an example of the difficulties in upgrading -- hundreds of diff files to sort through every few days.
RedHat -- They just had some weird stuff that was really inconsistent. Everytime I change my firewall rules, my ntpserver was disabled. WTF? Inconsistent behaviour that was never disclosed during the operation. And I don't like their GUI approach of making everything appear as one. Too socialistic for me.
Suse -- I used this one the longest and found the greatest problem with it over time. Suse does a superior job of supporting you hardware/software needs as long as you do exactly what they expect you to do. Installation of anything beside KDE you are stepping closer to the edge. Custom configurations of installations will push you to a point where Suse will not upgrade/manage that package for you and before you know it -- you're running a whole software space in customized RPM's or having your installation re-configured back to the basics during upgrades.
Debian -- It's not the easiest to configure. But it's the most polite about allowing you to make modifications, keep those modifications, and follow expected behaviours. And it's stable, allowing me more time to do the fun stuff.