Why Debian Matters More Than Ever

Julie188 writes "If you look at the feature list for Debian 6, released on February 6, it's easy to be underwhelmed. This is especially true when measuring Debian against its offspring, like Ubuntu. Debian doesn't get much credit, and its become trendy for industry pundits to claim it's become irrelevant. But it's more relevant than ever. If you're using Ubuntu (or Linux Mint, or Mepis...), you're really using Debian with some enhancements. According to a presentation given recently by Debian Project Leader (DPL) Stefano Zacchiroli, only 7% of Ubuntu is directly derived from upstream projects, Canonical's projects, or other non-Debian sources. Of the rest, 74% of Ubuntu is rebuilt Debian packages, and 18% are patched and rebuilt Debian packages."

Comments

Since when?

[Tubal-Cain]

Debian doesn't get much credit, and its become trendy for industry pundits to claim it's become irrelevant.

News to me. Who's calling it irrelevant?

Re:Since when?

[Anonymous Coward]

agreed. debian is probably the most successful linux distribution ever, and i'd probably turn to freebsd before another linux distro.

sadly, one often hears a sense on the debian mailing lists, etc, that users (and even debian developers) would like to make debian slicker and more appealing to desktop users (more like ubuntu, or mint, for example). i consider this (especially the infighting) to be a huge mistake. ubuntu is just "the externalization of all the tweaks suitable for desktop users", and I consider this to be "The Right (tm)" solution to the "how best to please everyone all the time" problem (aka the "world domination syndrom") that most distros suffer from.

i really appreciate debian as a solid foundation. fwiw, i usually install a base system and then add on from there.

debian, and all the derivative distros should work together while supporting these types of forks... ubuntu should just be a repository of exactly/only the packages that are tweaked or added above and beyond the debian packages. it should be reasonable to just add an ubuntu repo to my sources file and do an upgrade to get to a typical ubuntu.

Re:Since when?

[sg_oneill]

Oh absolutely. I recently came to realise just how much I took Debian for granted when I had to set up a Django site with Post-GIS on a CentOS (5.5) box.

Out of the box Centos only supported Python 2.4(!) and if you update it, you break everything. So trying to install a parallell version, I tried to use the EPEL repository to install Python 2.6. All good and fine until I realised I had to recompile my own pysocopg2 driver.

Then I realised Postgres and PostGIS where way too old for django. Could I update? Nope! the 8.4 version in epel didnt have any obvious version of PostGIS.

Giving up at wasting 2 days of my clients time recompiling things, trying to patch broken scripts, fighting busted versions of upgraded non supported software and pulling hair out, I badgered the host to install Debian squeeze for me (thanks Rackforce!) and they did.

Heres how I then did all this without pain on Squeeze:

root@debian:~# apt-get install postgresql-8.4-postgis
root@debian:~# apt-get install libapache2-mod-passenger
root@debian:~# apt-get install python-django python-django-south

And thats that. Server set up in 4 easy commands. No compiling, no complicated patch files, everything automatically and intelligently downloaded, installed, and checked for conflicts by the OS.

You'll note it looks like I have missed some things. Not true, apt-get knows installing an apache mod without apache is silly and did it for me, likewise installing postgis without the server itself is also silly. Everything done, checked for sanity, and so on.

Now of course I know YUM can do all that too, but thats no good to me, when the repository is that old its got 7 year old language distros as its cutting edge.

Its amazing to think that once upon a time Debian was considered behind the times.

See why I love this operating system?