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Happy 17th Birthday, Debian!
An anonymous reader writes "Debian turns 17 today. Yes it has really come a long way from being Murdock's pet project back in 1993 to being the distribution on which the most popular Linux distribution, Ubuntu, is now based."
Thanks Murdock! This distro is still one of the easiest to maintain over a long period of time.
I was coming from Slackware and apt-get seemed magical. Never left the boat since.
Long life to Debian!
Just happen to be on campus today, maybe I'll go over to the CS building and pour one out.
So there are two important aprts of the internet with birthdays very close together. I wonder if Debian or IE will last the longest?
... Debian can fsck all it wants ;)
It's actually kind of sad that most people identify Debian solely as being "that one that Ubuntu's based on".
Just disrupt the deflector shield with a tachyon burst.
So far as being easy to use goes, I give Mepis more marks than its more popular cousin Ubuntu. Those that have tried it will understand. And I am not a KDE fan boy, not with my fond memories of RH 7.2
For every present, there is a past
Debian, making installing dependencies a reflex rather than a compulsory chore. That alone would have gotten my praise. Then they also bolted on an incredibly stable and useful kernel and software stack on top of that.
Good show! (I know I got the order wrong, but thats the order of importance to me)
md5sum
d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
Is there -any- possible reason for this ./ article to link to http://digitizor.com/2010/08/16/happy-17th-birthday-debian-and-some-interesting-history/ instead of linking to the _official_ birthday page: http://thank.debian.net/
Also, like kwebbles mentioned, it's really sad you sad to bring up Ubuntu. It's Debian's birthday, you insensitive clods.
To the distro I keep crawling back to. I always go off searching for the next great thing, and realise debian was the great thing all along.
And ubuntu is second rate (at best) compared to debian. Ubuntu's got severe stability problems. debian almost never fails me.
If you want to say thanks:
http://thank.debian.net/
I'll post it on facebook. Seriously. When does the big Two-Oh happen? 2012?
Meanwhile Commodore=64 GEOS, Amiga, Atari ST, and Windows OS are celebrating their 25th this year. MS-DOS is now over-the-hill at 30 (things not as firm... not as perky as they used to be).
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
the distribution on which the most popular Linux distribution, Ubuntu, is based on now
...what?
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
When did having birthday parties for software programs become all the rage? It's almost as disturbing as how so many of these programs are now teenagers. Here's some of the drama we'll be able to look forward to over the next year:
- Internet Explorer will get its driver's license and crash its first car, because everyone knows how unstable it is.
- Debian will join the Army rather than go to college, as mandated by the Debian Constitution. And because it has no friends.
- OS X will pick a fight with Firefox on the elementary school playground after Firefox steals on WebKit's lunch money.
- Windows will be that creepy adult chaperone that hangs around at, like, every high school dance because it wants to be cool.
Better... Windows doesn't run Linux code right.
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
Windows NT was first released in 1993, making it the same age as Debian. Before NT, windows was a user interface on top of DOS, not an OS on it's own (although it was doing VM as of 3.1 and networking as of 3.11, but not it's own filesystem management).
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The main advantage I got out of Debian rapidly approaching 15 years ago was the DFSG Debian Free Software Guidelines
http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines
That saved me from a mighty holy war being brewed up by the IT department. They tolerated it and left the engineering department alone, which worked pretty well.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
It's at 3.0.6, and in stable (lenny).
http://packages.debian.net/lenny/iceweasel
HTH
Anyone who was actually using Linux in 1993 knows the manifesto came a couple of years before anything else.
What, and no custom page from Google?
I feel unloved.
I don't entirely get all of the Ubuntu complaints.
Over the years I tried maybe fifteen or twenty different Linux distros. (back to the days of buying boxed sets of Mandrake floppy disks!) Each time I went back to Windows because I invariably ran into some problem that I just didn't have the time to figure out and fix. You know, little things like printers, modems, and video.
It's not that I don't like fixing things, or even learning new stuff, just that with Linux it was always so damned painful.
Two months ago I installed Ubuntu using their little Windows installer app, and I haven't looked back. Aside from one occasion when a specific Windows program wouldn't run under WINE, I have had no reason to fire up Windows. And when I did.. well, yuck.
You may call Ubuntu "dumbed down", but it's honestly the first distro I've seen that worked flawlessly out of the box with virtually no fiddling.
And of course you can still fire up a terminal window and enjoy the command line.
Three Squirrels
To honor it like we do 9/11, we should build a Windows Help Desk on the site.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
My daughter did not just turn 5..
The page itself is GPL, and attributed to one of the Women of Debian (http://women.debian.org/profiles/#Margarita Manterola)
I love my Debian NSLU2 installation. It's very stable and very easy to administrate. Love having the ability to back up my netbook into a cvs repository on the road. It's quiet, uses little energy, and I don't even have to think about it. Squirrel Mail was even easy to set up. I love Debian and have used it since Debian 3.0 (Woody). Right now I am running Lenny on the NSLU2.
'course, I just realized my post makes it seem like I think Debian sucks.
Frankly, Debian kicks ass. For a server, I'd consider nothing else. I've long believed that apt is, hands down, the best package management system ever invented. And Debian has done a truly marvelous job of ensuring that upgrades Just Work... unlike Ubuntu or Redhat, I have never feared doing a full distro update on Debian. Their package quality is simply through the roof (well, minus that pesky sshd bug they introduced ;).
Heck, I should given Debian a try again. It's been a couple years since I made the leap to Ubuntu, and it may be that Debian unstable could now fill the roll that Ubuntu fills for me today (as a modern desktop distro)... particularly given how incredibly painful Ubuntu in-place upgrades can be. OTOH, I am spoiled by the fact that Ubuntu has the nVidia blob drivers incorporated into their software repo...
Men use Gentoo. REAL Men use Linux from scratch. REALLY REAL MEN, write their own OS.
Debian is for wussies. Ubuntu is for wussies who at least have the balls to admit they are wussies.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
As an online discussion decomposing the software stack of a linux distribution grows longer, the probability of RMS bursting in and saying "It's actually kind of sad that most people soley identify the GNU toolchain environment as 'Linux', which is just kernel." approaches 1.
MS would rather step over them all to where they estimate things will go rather than resign to being an late starting also-ran.
If those guys are all occupied with WebKit, it frees MS to do something bold.
Mass audiences are incapable of finding appeal in Debian. ..for good reason.
What appeal could they find in a well organized toolbox, when all they really want is a shiny red hammer?
Do you realize what you are implying? That the linux distro flamewars on /. are completely irrelevant in real world? That is blasphemous! Even more so... You imply that nobody should care about the Slashdot-elitists who moan "I use a distro that is so much harder to use than the one you like!"!! Gasp!
Honestly... Ubuntu is quite awesome package when it comes to desktop use. I am a sophomore year software engineering student so I'm at least computer literate by any standards... Yet I keep going back to Ubuntu. The previous time I tried Debian I ran into numerous problems with wifi drivers. The wireless card should have been supported on Linux (Ubuntu wikis said so and I didn't bother to check separately for Debian... Stupid me.) but it took an hour to google the debian drivers (numerous dead links, etc.) and then I couldn't compile them. Didn't even get past 'make'. Another two hours of debugging for no avail, asking help from friends, etc... And at that point I asked myself "Why am I doing this?", installed Ubuntu and everything worked out of the box. I could probably have gotten the drivers from ubuntu repos somehow and gotten them to work on Debian but I really can't see the point in that... When it comes to desktop, Ubuntu usually just works a lot better than Debian. Hell, Ubuntu supports - out of the box many - devices that windows doesn't! People say that Redhat would just work too. Perhaps it is true, I haven't tried recently. (Some five years ago "just works" certainly wasn't my experience when it came to my ethernet card...) If you want to call that "dumbed down", fine. You are probably an idiot.
It is obvious that there is a lot of stuff for which Ubuntu isn't the optimal choice and plain old Debian triumphs. I think that most people understood the concept of different distros years ago: Some distros are good for some things, others are good for other things... Distro might be great for desktop while not being the best one around for enterprise servers. There always appears to be people who don't get that, though.
Memory leaks, behavioral inconsistencies from app to app from one release to another, apparent lack of testing..
Here are 4,270 bug reports listing a segmentation fault: https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bugs?field.searchtext=sigsegv&orderby=-number_of_duplicates&search=Search&field.status:list=NEW&field.status:list=INCOMPLETE_WITH_RESPONSE&field.status:list=INCOMPLETE_WITHOUT_RESPONSE&field.status:list=CONFIRMED&field.status:list=TRIAGED&field.status:list=INPROGRESS&field.status:list=FIXCOMMITTED&field.assignee=&field.bug_reporter=&field.omit_dupes=on&field.has_patch=&field.has_no_package=
5,000+ around Firefox: https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bugs?field.searchtext=firefox&orderby=-number_of_duplicates&search=Search&field.status:list=NEW&field.status:list=INCOMPLETE_WITH_RESPONSE&field.status:list=INCOMPLETE_WITHOUT_RESPONSE&field.status:list=CONFIRMED&field.status:list=TRIAGED&field.status:list=INPROGRESS&field.status:list=FIXCOMMITTED&field.assignee=&field.bug_reporter=&field.omit_dupes=on&field.has_patch=&field.has_no_package=
~149 containing memory leaks, and pages and pages of GNOME-related high or critical level bugs..
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bugs?field.assignee=&field.bug_reporter=&field.has_no_package=&field.has_patch=&field.omit_dupes=on&field.searchtext=gnome&field.status:list=CONFIRMED&field.status:list=FIXCOMMITTED&field.status:list=INCOMPLETE_WITHOUT_RESPONSE&field.status:list=INCOMPLETE_WITH_RESPONSE&field.status:list=INPROGRESS&field.status:list=NEW&field.status:list=TRIAGED&orderby=-importance&search=Search&start=75
To get the fglrx and nvidia proprietary drivers in Debian all you have to do is add "non-free" to the urls in your sources.list file. Those drivers have been available in non-free for far longer than you've been using Ubuntu.
You're knocking Debian for what amounts to your own ignorance.
"while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude." de Tocqueville
What appeal could they find in a well organized toolbox, when all they really want is a shiny red hammer?
Hey, if using Debian makes you feel like your ePenis is a little bit bigger, more power to you.
Me, I've gotten over it. I was a Debian user for years after suffering through Slack and RedHat (if you've never installed Slack from floppies, you don't know pain...). Then I discovered Ubuntu. What? Suddenly things like networking and wireless just working without having to hack config files for hours? A modern package set? *And* apt-based package management? Since then, I've never looked back.
Well, okay, that's not true. Ubuntu has bungled the last couple upgrades to the point where I'm no longer willing to perform an in-place upgrade, which rather sucks... maybe its time to take another look at Debian unstable...
I'm not "knocking" Debian at all. Quit being a defensive jackass.
Thanks for the tip, when I was using Debian (which was a couple years ago), I had no need for non-free drivers, and it's unquestionable that Ubuntu integrates them into their system more directly. That said, adding another repo to apt is simple enough, so maybe it is time I test-drive unstable again (particularly since my laptop is now a few years old, and so driver support is no longer an issue).
Celebrate the freedom inherent in Debian and other free software: apply their principles to human governance.
No, you do not have to do all the work: it is already started. Please join the movement and help free yourself from the tyranny of corrupt politicians.
Get started at http://metagovernment.org/.
This.
I just giggled at these comments, where everyone's saying "Ubuntu just works" ... except in upgrades. It's like a fancy haircut from a stylist that just works, except you can't duplicate it the following evening for your date.
Just updating things like Open Office and Firefox caused dependency clashes - sorry, that's totally unacceptable. I met my share of the version upgrade bugs too.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Really? I've been an Ubuntu user for about five years now, and the last three or four releases are the only ones that haven't been bungled. I realize this is just my personal experience, but I was under the impression they were getting better.
Well, maybe I'm just responding to unbalanced criticism. My experience upgrading (I think) 8.04 -> 8.10 wasn't exactly smooth, and I've heard no end of issues with subsequent upgrades. But, meh, who knows, maybe those are just vocal minorities... problem is, if there *are* issues, it's hard to unfuck a fucked system. :/
Debian: Linux based server platform every commercial company would like to call theirs.
Ubuntu:Debian spinoff with a desktop vaguely resembling but never competitive to the one of a commercial company.
Wow, the fanbois are out in force today... flamebait? Really?
Maybe you should try Windows again after all these years, I'm sure it had made progress too.
Na, not for me, I like free.
...than that other birthday Slashdot's recognizing today.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
Give stable a try, you won't regret it. Those days that stable was old as hell are gone.
Rethinking email
They've beeing available, that is true. But they didn't use to work before Ubuntu. Nowadays the driver commes compiled and included at the kernel package, with the GLX dependency controlled by apt. Now it works.
Rethinking email
I started out with Slackware and Redhat, then installed Debian Bo, Hamm, and on down till Sarge. For some reason I skipped Sarge and moved on to Gentoo. Part of the reason for that was that Gentoo had a kick ass AMD64 distro while Debian was still trying to figure out how best to do AMD64.... ..... .....
I came back to Debian with Etch about the time my Gentoo system melted down for the last time after an upgrade
Right now I'm running Linux Mint, but I can't stand Gnome and will probably install Mint KDE (finally available) or perhaps try Debian Testing, now that Squeeze is frozen.
I've used Ubuntu,and it's not bad, especially on older machines (P4, Duron, Celeron, etc). I don't think I could stomach anything that used RPM
The *best* is my *favorite*.
Favouritism is only that. Best is Best. Period.
> Ubuntu has bungled the last couple upgrades
That's putting it mildly. They basically chased me to Fedora. It doesn't have in-place upgrades at all, unfortunately, but there's some fundamentals they got right, like SELinux (something Ubuntu still doesn't have) and not completely screwing up PulseAudio integration. The garish and gratuitously different window manager theme of the current Ubuntu just reinforces my perception that Fedora is about development while Ubuntu is all about churn.
I should have put a premium on /maturity/ when comparing the two..
My mistake!
My latest upgrade (from 9.10 to 10.04) went along just fine. I disabled as much PPA's as possible (they're unsupported, just like 3rd party Debian repositories which can also ruin your upgrade) and downgraded most newer packages to Ubuntu versions where needed with Synaptic. I then made sure the "ubuntu-desktop" package was installed and ran the do-release-upgrade program.
The only things I had to do afterwards was to remove apache2-mpm-prefork and friends (I had apache2-bin for the htpasswd utility) and disable a couple of things that ran on startup because either it recreated init script links or installed shiny new upstart configs. Plymouth reverted to an ugly text-mode splash (looks very old-school), but then I found the wonderful "startupmanager" program where it was just a matter of configuring the desired resolution and enabling the splash during boot option. It's all shiny now, but I rarely reboot between kernel upgrades so I don't get to see it a lot. Most configuration files can be left alone and still work fine afterwards, there weren't any problems on my box with those.
Though one thing that always needs fixing is the Gnome panel, it can get screwed up in so many ways I remember the command to reset it from the back of my head:
gconftool-2 --recursive-unset /apps/panel
Between 8.04 (Gnome 2.22) and 10.04 (Gnome 2.30), there are a lot of panel related regressions. In fact I'm sticking to defaults now. I merely increase the number of workspaces to 4.
Wow, at first I thought you were being sarcastic, but... now I'm not so sure.
Such a bald-ass simple statement really requires back up. I've not had ANY stability problems, much less severe.
Sure. Here's a fun one in a recent release.
1) Install 9.04 to a JFS root and boot from it.
2) Do an unclean shutdown.
3) Boot the machine.
Ta-da! Your config is now semi-borked. Why? Because the Ubuntu devs forgot that not everyone runs on ext3, thus one of the boot scripts made a silly assumption re: fsck and the necessity thereof. Since JFS requires fsck after an unclean shutdown (and will, in fact, refuse to mount in anything other than read-only until it has been marked as clean), your root partition is now read-only. It's easy to fix *if* you know what to look for, but still -- there's just no excuse for that sort of bug slipping into a release.
My desktop system is 64 bit, 3.2GHz, superscalar, NUMA, with 4GB of quite fast RAM and 250GB of disk in the box plus some chained off the back. I like to play games occasionally. It runs Ubuntu Lucid x64 with Compiz and many other foofy things.
I have a Dt168 (Geode LX 800) with 512MB RAM and 1GB flash disk. It runs Debian without X11.
The right tool for the right job.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I just giggled at these comments, where everyone's saying "Ubuntu just works" ... except in upgrades. It's like a fancy haircut from a stylist that just works, except you can't duplicate it the following evening for your date.
I have had the same home folder since Dapper on x32 (I did nuke my .gnome2 folder from orbit once, intentionally) and have had the same install upgraded with the alternate CD since Feisty for x64, I originally ran it on a Gateway Gt5475E nForce2 nVidia GeForce 8600GT system and now it's on a selfbuilt Gigabyte GA-MA770UD3P v1.0/AMD Phenom II 720 X3 OC'd on air to 3.2 GHz w/Cooler master triple direct-contact heat pipe and Gigabyte/nVidia GT240 1GB running Lucid x64. I have upgraded the system through each interim revision. I have long used PPAs including my own (nothing in there worth mentioning now though, I'm all outdated... thankfully!)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I have had one Debian installation still kicking butt from 2005 on three different PCs (AMD and Intel too). It's amazing. I wonder how much longer before I need to wipe it clean to install from scratch (used its net-install in 2005).
Can Ubuntu do this? I have had problems with its dist-upgrades a few years ago, but not Debian's. :/
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
One more year to be 18 years old... ;)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Kind of depends on the mass audience we're talking about. I started rolling out Ubuntu to my clients that wanted to get away from Windows, thinking that it would be just the thing. But, over the years I've ended up switching that over to Debian. The reason is simple, for business users, you need the OS to "just work" and keep on doing so. For home users, you can get away with less stability as long as youtube, email and syncing with the iPod works.
That's just my experience, your mileage may vary.
Using module-assistant makes the compilation and installation process point-and-click. It walks you right through the entire process as it downloads what it needs, then compiles and installs everything for you. I started using it soon after I first used Debian (I Linux for less than a year), and didn't find it difficult to learn. All I had to do was follow the directions.
"while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude." de Tocqueville
So weird to hear "insensitive clod" used around here in a context where it's actually totally true...
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
Fedora. It doesn't have in-place upgrades at all
Sure it does. Just use preupgrade. I used it to go from Fedora 12 to Fedora 13.
That would be Fedora, not Ubuntu. It has a lot more users than Ubuntu. And it's not based on Debian.
Thank you Ian.
Sorry it didn't work out with Deb.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
It's just a crap shoot each time - everyone who encounters a problem says "this is the worst release ever" and everyone who doesn't proclaims it a work of perfection. Guess this is why the plural of anecdote is not data. Luckily I have enough chops to rectify upgrade problems when they occur, so it isn't an issue either way for me.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
It's just a crap shoot each time
Fundamentally, I think that's my point... I have absolutely no confidence that I can upgrade an Ubuntu machine safely specifically *because* its a crapshoot. And so it's now simpler for me to actually re-install on a spare partition, test everything to make sure it works, and then migrate over when I'm confident, as then I don't end up spending hours trying to fix a broken system.
Luckily I have enough chops to rectify upgrade problems when they occur, so it isn't an issue either way for me.
Yeah, I've spent way too many years dicking around with semi-broken Linux machines to enjoy or even put up with that kind of crap anymore. It's just not worth the effort when I could be off doing something far more productive.