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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."
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?
I've sampled the others, and it just keeps working for me.
When other distros let me down -- even the debian based ones (like Ubuntu failing miserably over and over on my wife's netbook) -- debian, with the desktop set of packages installed, works beautifully.
You can't just count packages and draw conclusions from counts. Some of the packages haven't been updated in years. Some are only used by like five users on the planet. Some are so buggy they won't even run.
Weigh them by how many people install and use them, and you've got something to talk about, though.
ubuntu is to debian as firefox is to gecko
I have, however, read MANY comments on the evils of the very bits of default software that make me like Ubuntu.
I have Squeeze running on a desktop and my home server. It is excellent. I have a Ubuntu desktop also. I really see no major difference except with Debian you don't have to update every two days to keep current. The long release cycle is excellent for servers. The new version has the latest bind, php 5.3, etc. Seems really current to me. It also plays Sirus player, compiz, software-center, just like debian. 2.6.27 compiled fine and runs like a top.
I have preferred it for some time, but it does have those little quirks that put it above newb access level still.
Really wish I could have done the last dist upgrade without it dropping my display settings and losing my drivers. Come on, who really cared if the kernel was relying on some 'non free' firmware, I wasn't protesting outside Debian offices about it. Sometimes they take this free crap too far.
No, aside from bitching about minor inconveniences, I still have to choose Debian for all serious installs (and Puppy for the other installs :)
If I had a DeLorean... I would probably only drive it from time to time.
I don't think many of the people using Ubuntu or other OSS are going to give permission for a package manager to snoop and send back this information.
You've just described the Debian Popularity Contest. It has a lot of users, although probably not a large proportion of all Debian users.
Not sure how long Ubantu has been around... never heard of it.
Ubuntu on the other hand was first released 20 October 2004. Ubuntu is used by an estimated 12 million users and accounts for about 50% share of desktop Linux users.
I would take these numbers all a grain of salt as they are estimates from Canonical and others. Stats courtesy the Ubuntu Wikipedia article. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_(operating_system)
HTC EVO 4G LTE w/ CM 10.2 | NookColor w/ CM 10.2 | Samsung Epic 4G w/ CM 10.1
People still use Gentoo? Wow! That was always my fav distro. How well is Gentoo being maintained nowadays?
I was actually thinking of trying Debian 'cause I figured Gentoo would have rotted over the last few years.
http://www.masturbateforpeace.com/
Debian is one of the last major Linux distros still supporting PowerPC (along with Gentoo, Arch Linux PPC, and a few others). Ubuntu discontinued official PowerPC support in 2007, and Fedora did the same in 2010. I'm tempted to install Debian 6 on my Apple eMac, replacing Fedora 12 (which reached EOL a couple months ago).
Is this supposed to be sarcastic?
Debian is not Ubuntu's grandparent, that's a really bad analogy. If anything, Ubuntu's a leech (a very pretty leech, yes) to Debian. It's more of a symbiotic relationship than a true leech, but Ubuntu would have a very hard time to move forward without Debian's foundation and the work done by Debian developers. Chances are a LOT of Debian updates find their way into Ubuntu, so when the former updates, the latter benefits from it.
If Debian died today all the sudden, Ubuntu wouldn't grind to a halt, but it'd be struggling to keep its pace.
A lot of people are upset that Ubuntu doesn't give back a lot to Debian in terms of packages/software/whatever, however what Ubuntu gives Debian (and indeed Linux) is a more approachable OS package as a whole, something more suitable to the non-geek, this is something that Linux/Debian have never really bothered with a lot while in the realm of genuine geeks but it's something that Ubuntu adds and which is greatly appreciated by people outside of the geek circle. So while you cannot measure Ubuntu's 'give back' in quantitative terms it is still giving a huge amount in other areas where advancements were sorely needed.
I don't see the problem with Ubuntu being a Debian based distro - isn't this what Debian or any other distro would want - a larger adoption rate? It's all GPL, it's not like licences are being broken.. or is the crying from a minority more to do with a bad case of sour-grapes?
debian has a package called popularity-contest, which it asks to install when you do a new debian install. from the package description:
Description: Vote for your favourite packages automatically
The popularity-contest package sets up a cron job that will
periodically anonymously submit to the Debian developers
statistics about the most used Debian packages on this system.
.
This information helps Debian making decisions such as which packages
should go on the first CD. It also lets Debian improve future versions
of the distribution so that the most popular packages are the ones which
are installed automatically for new users.
Popularity contest statistics for popularity-contest says that 99.76% of the almost hundred-thousand Debian users sending statistics back to the "popularity contest" have installed the application which gathers such statistics.
You can't just count packages and draw conclusions from counts. Some of the packages haven't been updated in years. Some are only used by like five users on the planet. Some are so buggy they won't even run.
Maybe, but if a Debian package out of date, uncommon, or unusably buggy, then I expect that Ubuntu would not import it or pull from the upstream project. You know, the packages the summary is talking about.
Let me say that the Debian team has My deepest thanks for a job well done. I am a user of distro Linux because of the periodic search for bandwidth (and of course to host my endless emails of viagra ads.) The Debian team should be studied from the perspective of package compatibility and strong support of Aptitude. Support is due to the proper application of (or perhapss luck) over the years of use in the package management. I know you kids love compiling kernels and it makes me sigh with appreciation for youthful energy. My need is to slam into another account, setup a complicated gizmo and let the freedom of speech reside. But somehow the setup is pretty capible of supporting obscure configurations without alot of effort. Thats a distro folks, for my opinon. Of course Ubuntu is nice for sitting on the console ... For a remote, Debian is my #1.
SNS (Shiny New Shit syndrome) is a very serious condition that can negatively impact the reliability of your computer.
Debian cares, and it's their job to care. You should probably read the release notes before you upgrade between major versions.
I think the best way to draw attention to hardware that doesn't function without non-free drivers and firmware is to have a distribution that will take a principled stand against including such software. That way, you can try to install Debian on a computer and know exactly what is supported by free software.
I would say those estimates are not unreasonable. You probably have to assume that Kubuntu and Xubuntu and Edubuntu contribute to those numbers too, as they all draw from the same repositories.
I've long used Opensuse, but for joe user, Ubuntu is probably one of the easiest to install and keep up to date, especially when you can start with an LTS version.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
As noted in the article, Debian has never been a distribution that was built for the masses. Yes, some detailed knowledge of the hosting hardware is required. But this is nothing new. It's always been a distro for the more savvy user I.E. your down and dirty geeks and serious developers/administrators.
While some complain loudly about the release schedule (?) that Debian is famous for, it is this very attention to detail that makes each new release of Debian one the most stable in the Linux world.
While Debian does not ooze with the WOW! factor like Ubuntu and many others, it is Debian that enables these other distros to prosper. Without the solid platform furnished by Debian the many derivative distros would would find it very difficult at best and nearly impossible at worst to maintain their aggressive release schedules.
I use Ubuntu. It seems to have problems getting along with the sound hardware on my machine (something I never saw while using pure Debian) but, overall it's a good distro. However, if you have experienced the "pure Debian" distro there is no doubt regarding Ubuntu's ancestry.
Unix has always been User Friendly
Let Debian do it's collectivist work in the shadows, and Canonical can provide the capitalist facade that keeps Them at bay. . . This arrangement might be its only hope for survival. Voluntary virtual-subjugation? Since data, unlike food, can be copied endlessly-- this might be a pretty good arrangement. Until it isn't, anyway.
Ubuntu wouldn't exist without it, and the Debian contributers deserve a big "Thank you" for their contribution to fantastic software that you can use for free.
Yes, how dare they stick to their principles if it annoys me!
They even host (unofficial) CD images with the non-free firmware, so I don't know what you're complaining about.
Dilbert RSS feed
How the hell do the other 0.24% report them?
Dilbert RSS feed
Cars are 90% horse carriages repackaged with some added features (an engine.) So really, carriages are still very much relevant.
Using your criteria, I cared about Linux in 95-96, starting with Slackware. 80% of my time was spent doing the following:
1) "Hey, foo has come out! I hear it's awesome!" ./configure. "foo requires barlib5.2.1." ./configure. "barlib5.2.1 requires balib2.1.3, bolib6.8, parlib 3.9"
2) Find barlib5.2.1.
3) Find balib2.1.3 from some random website being maintained by god-knows-who. "balib2.1.3 requires teelib 8.1"
etc.
Recursively discovering, downloading, and compiling the 500 source libraries required in order to make configuring of a Makefile not choke just to get one app to work. Dealing with X configurations was not fun, and dealing with researching in order to (hopefully) answer 800 kernel questions was not fun.
My greatest "joy" of that period was compiling/installing a newer glibc and managing to annihilate my system. I remember going onto IRC asking how to go about repairing this and met with the answer of "In the future, don't do that!" (This is back when metacrawler was the King of search engines, and finding help wasn't always easy).
Over the years, after moving from Slackware to Redhat to Fedora to Ubuntu, I am incredibly thankful that I no longer have to "care" about Linux anymore. Give me my performance hit for the sake of convenience. I'll gladly take it over the alternative.
I'm always a little concerned what might happen if Ubuntu became too much of its own ecosystem - and started to drift away from its Debian roots. According to the text "only 7% of Ubuntu is directly derived from upstream projects, Canonical's projects, or other non-Debian sources". Just about the worst thing that could happen to Debian is a fork (and the enhanced probability lies squarely in Ubuntu's lap).
In a way, Debian and Ubuntu provide an ideal symbiosis - the sober one to ensure the party animal turns up to work the next day, but also a good time is had by all.
My greatest concern is if Canonical and friends stopped driving/upstreaming improvements, a wholesale migration would be encouraged. And then we only have Ubuntu (and friends of course) - and once the symbiosis is broken it's very hard to put back together.
I use Ubuntu because it is the 'Apple' of Linux distributions. ... it just works... I even violate my Linux roots sometimes and configure stuff through the GUI. I think it is Steven Vaughan-Nichols who is not relevant. And it it were not for Debian, there would be no Ubuntu.
Yes, yes, I know that Red Hat works too, but it just doesn't DO anything. RPMs that won't install. An ugly incoherent out of date GUI. configured for security ... meaning you should consider yourself privileged that it actually lets you login.
If you want bleeding edge, you run sid, not stable.
Sent from my PDP-11
There's still some work to do on cultivating a bit of coordination between sets of packages. E.g. they managed to hose my BOINC cluster NFS shares by dropping aufs NFS export support before there was a viable replacement (unionfs seems to take an asymptotic path towards full completion). They decided as a matter of policy to not fix that, because aufs NFS isn't especially high quality code... gee thanks, all of us who were just using it to run junk clusters don't exactly need data center quality. But that's life in unstable... things break more often on the bleeding edge.
This pales, however, in comparison to the hell I watch the sysops at work go through with RedHat/CentOS.
Someone had to do it.
Personally, I don't understand why people claim that Ubuntu is more "user-friendly". I tried ubuntu for about a year before finally taking the dive into Debian (had used Fedora/RH for 8 years prior, but finally got tired of yum breaking stuff). Stuff broke on Ubuntu (not as much as Fedora!), and I wasted time fixing it. I installed Ubuntu for a few n00bs, friends who were tired of their virus/crash ridden XP, etc. They all became frustrated, because, well, stuff broke, and they didn't know how to fix it. Now, when my Mom got an old computer from a friend, a 400hmz PII with like 128mb ram, I installed Lenny on it for her. It's run great ever since, without a single problem (time to go update her to Squeeze, though). I've been using Debian on all my desktops now for about 2 years, upgraded to Squeeze last weekend. The most trivially easy, seamless upgrade ever. (can't be said of ubuntu's frantic release schedule, where every new silly snake release breaks more stuff). Nothing ever breaks in Debian. I haven't had a single software problem since making the move, and I can't imagine ever moving away, now. It's rock-solid, impregnable, and it just works. I don't get what's supposedly so "user-friendly" about Ubuntu. For one thing, I kind of agree with Tuomo Valkonen about "usability" anyway. Do what I want, only what I want, and stay out of the way. Ubuntu makes too many decisions for the user, and not always good ones (usually tying a ton of bloat together in "metapackages" in such fashion that you can't remove some useless crap like, say , cowsay, or something, without removing your entire window manager). Debian allows me to install what I need, precisely, no more no less. And for n00bs, it doesn't break and cause problems.
-- tonybaldwin.me
Nobody gives a shit how smart you think you are just because you are SLIGHTLY relatively young and by luck you can get a Linux distro working on your particular setup with a default install.
Get bent.
Indeed. Ubuntu comes from an African word meaning "can't install Debian".
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Let the flame wars begin!
I have been developing software for, and administering, computers for the last 30+ plus years on systems ranging from the old proprietary SuperMini's of the 1980's to the high powered HP and Sun systems of today.
I've been using Linux since kernel version 0.9x. I've have used Slackware, Mandrake, Red Hat, Debian, Gentoo, Suse and Ubuntu as well as OpenBSD (BTW, the build system in Gentoo smells suspiciously like the system that has been in place in the various *BSD distros for years). I have spent many a night building packages and custom kernels just because I like to play with 'em.
My point is, there is room for everybody in the Linux universe. To loudly complain that people who use a binary based distro "are to lazy to use a real Linux system" is to display a pure lack of consideration for everyone who is not "A True Geek (tm)". To display such an intolerance toward the many people who make up the current and future user base for Linux reveals the very attitude that has prevented Linux from making significant inroads into the casual user segment of the market until very recently.
To imply that "I'm better than you" because you like to build your own distro only serves to continue to fan the flame wars and insult the intelligence of the casual user. However, these casual users are the very reason that FOSS exists.
If you desire to be an ubergeek, please feel free to do so. That's what Linux, and Open Source Software is all about. However, Linux is ALSO all about giving the casual computer user a choice ... preferably a choice that is more secure that M$ could ever hope to be. But make room for the Joe Public too.
Unix has always been User Friendly
You can't just count packages and draw conclusions from counts. Some of the packages haven't been updated in years. Some are only used by like five users on the planet. Some are so buggy they won't even run.
Weigh them by how many people install and use them, and you've got something to talk about, though.
Nope, you sure can't draw conclusions off of package counts alone.
However, a person, such as myself, can use Debian since 2003 and come to the conclusion that the packages, and packaging, in Debian are of high quality. A typical Debian Gnome desktop install takes around 3-4 gigs of hard drive space. My desktop installations, after a year or two, normally take up 12 to 15 gigs due to the number of packages I install. My longest running install--apt-get dist-upgrades from Woody through Etch--had more than 20 gigs of installed software. So, I can say I use a lot of the packages in the Debian repositories and I can't say I find buggy software inside Debian.
I can also come to the conclusion that you're just running at the mouth and have no idea as to what you're talking about. You're just plain old spreading FUD, nothing more or less than that. Seven, going on eight, years of Debian experince allows me to draw that conclusion about your post.
"while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude." de Tocqueville
I missed that completely. I wondered why squeeze was a bit quiet this week.
I really don't know why this is set as flamebait, some ppl actually do have real issues with a debian install.. given all the confusing d/l options available, along with lax luster support for wifi drivers and such.
Life was hell, then I discovered Linux...
If Ubuntu disappeared tomorrow would the Debian team notice?
If Debian disappeared tomorrow would the Ubuntu team notice?
Now ask yourself. Who exactly isn't relevant?
Ummmm.... Goes to show you know very little about Debian. If you want up-to-date software run testing. It has fewer bugs than Ubuntu, and on average has newer software versions. Sure, Ubuntu may add some new packages before Debian does, but comparing package to package, Debian testing is more up-to-date....
I've been running testing or unstable on my workstation and laptop for years and I run into fewer problems in them than I do whenever I have tried Ubuntu. Ubuntu takes a snapshot of Debian unstable and then works on it for 6 months. For the 6 months Debian is moving to newer versions of the software Ubuntu took in the snapshot. Result? Unstable/Sid has newer software in the vast majority of cases.
"while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude." de Tocqueville
In almost 8 years of Debian usage I've run into that one time, but it was in testing, not stable, and it required the upgrading of glic so it was dependent on a major system change.
"while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude." de Tocqueville
Proudly posted from Debian 7.0 wheeze/testing
That's it.
How the hell do the other 0.24% report them?
Probably privacy purists who don't want software sending things automatically over the internet, and send their results off manually.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
explain
Ummm... 2003 is calling and wants your FUD back.
Debian's installer is no more difficult than Ubuntu's. or Windows, although it does give you the option to go into more detail by using the "so-called" expert mode. Today's "expert" mode is pretty much dead simple unless you use something like linux RAID and then it requires you to know RAID. Other than that it doesn't require anywhere near the knowledge the Woody installer did.
It took me 3 tries to install Woody. If the Squeeze installer had been used for Woody installations I would have had a working installation the first time, knowing what I did then..
"while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude." de Tocqueville
Yeah, but they'd still need popcon to generate the list, which has a specific format.
Dilbert RSS feed
This summary is drawn from an opinion piece which was originally inspired by a presentation by Debian leader Stefano Zacchiroli in January called "Who the bloody hell cares about Debian".
Original presentation makes a solid case for why Debian is more important now than ever.
Stefano's blog post discussing the story behind the presentation is here. There is a link to the slides there and apparently video will be available soon.
Hey! What do you mean 5? There are like 6 people that use JOE(Joe's Own Editor) and Nano is for L user's that don't know word star key binding's. /playgeekcard
There is or can be built a machine that can simulate any physical object. -Church-Turing principle
A more significant historical link to the past, Corel Linux ,1999,was called Slink & a half. 9slink & Potato.'
Also Mint now has a release based on, 100% compatible with, Debian testing.
Just a bunch of noise though, love the new release, don't care what anyone else uses.
Or even Unstable or Testing :)
"To prevent this day from getting any worse, I'll just read ERROR as GOOD THING" 1GJU8xLuDKDxEs4KLf8fAGyptoDsqvEsBT
I suspect that the most likely explanation is that those machines have suffered from dpkg database corruption.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
What does this mean? As GNOME was Ubuntu's desktop, it means a mass of new users for GNOME. I think this has been one of the main influences of Ubuntu. Linux has been on the server a long time, and people have been mucking with Apache on Linux and the like for a long time. But Ubuntu brought a lot of new users to the Linux desktop, and suddenly GNOME had a much wider user base than it did. This has exposed some bugs in GNOME and freedesktop.org applications, many of which have been patched. I have been mostly following the evince/poppler/cairo portion of this universe, and the influx of Ubuntu users has exposed bugs in all of these programs/libraries, many of which have been patched. Of course, Ubuntu has been moving somewhat away from Gnome to Unity, and it has already begun with Natty Narwhal.
Does this mean that the Kernel is irrelevant? Seriously, this is the stupidest argument ever. They also cannot live without each other. As far as what Ubuntu community produces, Ubuntu and Debian have much different users. I would nearly guarantee that every user of Debian knows one programming language. The same is not true for Ubuntu. Lets move on to the next retarded Linux /. post.
Make that 7. :)
"this is obvious."
Since I put debian 6 on her laptop - the frequency of ubuntu updates annoyed her, and she refused to install them (windows failed her long ago - even without viruses the spyware slowed it to a crawl) - she thinks it matters a lot. And who am I to argue...?
I am slightly amused by all the insistence on its geek credentials. For the above installation I put the installation CD in and essentially pressed return until a working desktop came up. I admit I had to type 2 user names and passwords, but I didn't find it too onerous. For my other machines I might do other things - but that is me complicating matters and nothing inherently to do with debian. It seems all my hardware is so old now, it just works out of the box.
{Kindly refrain from posting "j00r m0m" jokes... heard them all before... really. Not a challenge, either.}
I think the best way to draw attention to hardware that doesn't function without non-free drivers and firmware is to have a distribution that will take a principled stand against including such software.
That distro is gNewSense.
So Debian is for Ubuntu what BSD is for OSX?
The Debian project lead, Stefano Zacchiroli, is being terribly misquoted.
The numbers in the article do not address the common case of having one package maintainer for both distros. That 74% actually means that 74% of packages are *in common* between the distros. It is conceivable that much of that 74% is because of maintainers who contribute to both distributions. It isn't fair to say that Debian does all the work and Ubuntu merely takes advantage of it.
Seeing that the same package exists in both Debian and Ubuntu does not mean that the package originated in Debian and was taken without effort by an Ubuntu maintainer. Frequently, the same person creates a package for both. Either by creating an Ubuntu package and verifying that it works on Debian or the other way around.
Go look at the names of package maintainers. You'll see the same big group of people working on both projects.
Who the Fuck is Steven Vaughan-Nichols?
I have run Debian based systems for a very long time. Mepis, Mint, Kubuntu, and on and on. On my server, it's just pure straight stable Debian. I did, at one point have to compromise slightly on that for PHP5, IIRC. It can be frustrating running pure stable Debian. Unstable Debian can be just as frustrating. Hence the need for third party Debian based distros. If it wasn't for Debian's crazy release schedule and placement of code in unstable or testing when it really needs to be in stable, there would be little need for the alternatives. Heck if Debian came out with a "Best of Debian" branch they'd probably kill most of the need for the Debian based distros.
I've used them all, and just like debian based more. Started with Slackware, went to RH and then Mandrake, then Debian - after that it becomes a blur. Even tried Corel Linux, LFS, Gentoo, DSL. Lastly, I tried building my own. But then I discovered Mepis, and Mint and Ubuntu variants. When Mepis went quiet, I switched to Mint. Tried Ubuntu, but hated it - for some reason.
Now of course this was a comment made by perhaps the most successful troll in the IT world, Mr. Nichols. So what can we really expect. This is what you get when you feed trolls too much. But using the closest thing we have to track Linux distribution, Distrowatch, Mr Nichols means if you're' not in the top three you're just not as important anymore. Then of course, you have the fact that Debian based distros control over 40% of the webserver market, [+ RH based ~92%]. I guess that's not important either.
nice sig...
"Get out of my CHAIR!"
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
"Ubuntu is debian packaged for (possibly non-tech-savvy) end-users and polished a bit."
Hmmmm. But then Mint would win out. Mint started out as Ubuntu packaged for (possibly non-tech-savvy) end-users and polished a bit. Then they skipped the intermediate step, Ubuntu, and went for the source itself - Debian.
I have been running Debian with XFCE on my eMac for a few years now and would recommend it. Alsa is buggy, you need to run alsa-conf each time after a reboot, limited Flash (PPC in general), limited Win codecs (PPC in general), depending on your hardware version the display settings can be funky and may need to be changed before you run X for the first time. It would be a better choice on the hardware, I tried Fedora for a moment and promptly went back to Debian.
News to me. Who's calling it irrelevant?
Didn't you get the memo from the department of small minds? Importance is now measured with a blood pressure cuff.
When a brick decides to be a simple brick "Imminent Storm Threatens Village".
In Zittrain's world (The Future of the Internet and How to Mess it Up Real Bad) what matters most of all in technology is generativity: the usefulness of a brick to support other bricks. Possibly I mean Lego bricks, but more likely I mean Mechano, since generativity gloms in all directions.
I've also read that C and/or C++ are less important than they once were, all the importance has shifted to other languages, themselves written in C/C++. Moreover, Internet Protocol is also overrated, and all the addresses are gone anyway. What matters now are Facebook pages.
Will this stupidity never end? Why do some people feel the need to stand up and scream from the rooftops "I don't get generativity"?
Debian sucked when it was the dominant distribution. Debian's proper place in the universe is as the primary building block for other distributions with looser morals. Debasement and gloss are the last layers in mass appeal. They almost always travel together.
Indeed. I ended up with Ubuntu on my netbook for a long while simply because when installing Debian the installer would mix up disklabels in various seemingly random ways while the Ubuntu installer actually managed to install grub on the SSD instead of the USB stick I was installing from (the Debian installer when told to install on "/dev/sdb" rather than "/dev/sda" of course borked the whole thing by configuring grub to attempt to load stuff from "/dev/sdb" which didn't exist when the USB stick wasn't attached).
Of course, I eventually solved that problem by setting up a PXE boot server and installing Debian that way, but just the fact that I had a choice between "mess around with the bootloader configuration", "boot over the network" or "just use Ubuntu" kind of highlights the issues with the install process for Debian. It's not a matter of shiny, it's a matter of making sure it doesn't outright break unless you go in and manually edit config files at the right point in the installation procedure.
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
You beat me to it although a different punch line.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
Fedora 12 also starts out with no sound on the eMac. Next time you reboot, you may want to try modprobe snd-powermac and see if that turns on sound. If so, try adding snd-powermac to /etc/modules, /etc/modules.conf, or /etc/sysconfig/modules .
Sure, I'm one of that five.
"Freedom in the US is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
tl;dr Property is theft.
Like a Tamagotchi, Gentoo will roll over and die if you do not tend to its needs on a daily basis.
Don't get me wrong, I loved this distribution while I used it, but at some point maintenance became too time-consuming, let alone the risk of stuff breaking right before an important deadline.
What about the other 1%?
they'd still need popcon to generate the list
They'd only need an understanding of the popcon list format, which could be obtained from looking at the source without installing. This is Debian — every package has source which can be perused by those with a wary eye.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
TCP/IP over carrier pigeon, using hand-crafted packets assembled to the correct protocol for popularity-contest to understand. Obviously.
> Some are so buggy they won't even run.
I have never had this problem with a Debian package. My strong impression is that buggy packages are removed before a Major Debian release is made.
According to the Linux Counter Debian is third on the list being installed on 15.97% of registered machines (after Ubuntu and Others). Yes, it is a self-selecting sample, but the numbers are large enough to carry some weight, IMHO.
Burns: We're building a casino!
McAllister: Arrr. Give me 5 minutes.
If you stopped producing carriages, cars would still be made.
Ubuntu, Mint, etc depend on Debian. Without it, they would need to base on something else or invest incredible amounts of time into providing it themselves.
To maintain your style, oh trusty AC:
>16 years old in 2011
>installed Windows 98
obvioustrollisobvious.jpg
> BTW, the build system in Gentoo smells suspiciously like the system that has been in place in the various *BSD distros for years
FreeBSD calls its package eco-system ports, Gentoo calls it portage. This is not a coincidence.
As of December, Ubuntu was behind nearly the same amount of Wikipedia traffic as Android, slightly more than the more directly comparable iPad (assuming phones aren't used as much for web surfing as computers are, whereas the iPad is specifically designed for it). Either the iPad is still irrelevant, or Ubuntu is relevant.
http://stats.wikimedia.org/archive/squid_reports/2010-12/SquidReportOperatingSystems.htm
Add another for JOE!
Hell I have two users on different systems that ask me to install it. That wouldn't happen to be you two would it?
Programs that require endless obscure libraries are written by lazy and.or incompetent coders who do lego brick style programming. When the start they don't ask themselves "How can I code this?", they ask themselves "What libraries do this?" and what you end up with is a bit of glue code requiring a dozen obscure libraries just to play an mp3 or whatever.
"after moving from Slackware to Redhat to Fedora to Ubuntu,"
Slackware is very much install and go now. The days of recompiling the kernel or manually hacking xorg.conf files are long gone. Of course you can still do that if you want. I installed Slack 13.0 on 2 quite recent laptops and it Just Worked on both of them , including wifi.
If you want to call yourself a Linux user, take a LFS cd and start compiling, if your not going to make your own distro using LFS then grab a good distrobution that actually makes Linux use act the way it's meant to be used. Slackware, Gentoo, Rock, T2 are all great distro's because they force the user to actually know thats going on with there system and care about how there system works.
Been there, done that. Have you ever customized a system to run on a 486 with 4mb ram, and run X? Have you set up your own bsd-based ARM router appliance (soekris) with VPN? Set up a memory-sharing computing cluster of some old boxes because it seemed like a fun thing to do?
It was fun, learned a lot, but I ultimately came to the conclusion... It's all just a big waste of time, really. It stops being fun, and you realize it's as pointless as dangling your balls in a piranha pool just to show how good you are (and for those of you that disagree, heres a fact for you : Your balls, and fish with sharp teeth are just not meant to be mixed. Doing that makes you an idiot, not a macho).
Now, my goal is just to get from A to B in the least amount of time, with the least frustrations on the way. If you thinks that makes you so much better than me, then you're just a silly bugger, and after a while, you'll realize the same.
It's The Golden Rule: "He who has the gold makes the rules."
Source based linux is for people too lazy to code their own OS in assembler. Problem, compilefag?
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
if you are "proudly posting" then why did you post as AC?
Yeah, Centos is useless for websites/webapps.
Does anyone have an informed opinion/anecdotes on Ubuntu Server (not desktop) vs. Debian (of whatever flavor) for websites/webapps ?
LTS vs. the latest?
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
I'm not underwhelmed at all. Debian 6 delivers exactly what I expect from it.
I've been using Debian for over 10 years, with some short trips into the worlds of Redhat, SuSE as well as Debian derivatives like Ubuntu. Debian is still the only one that I trust to smoothly upgrade from Debian 5 to Debian 6 within minutes without getting stuck somewhere and requiring me to fix things manually. Having upgraded 17 servers in the last few days, including web servers, mail servers, radius servers, etc. I've not been disappointed once.
All my servers are current and it didn't cause me a headache. How's this underwhelming?
RIP Kim Peek.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Kim_Peek
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Why do you think so? Most people use free software to get things done, not because they are tin-foil nuts.
Also, did you realise that there is a false dicotomy at the above paragraph. "Free software nuts" is different from "tin-foil nuts", and whther any of them aren really nuts is out to the reader to decide.
Rethinking email
Ubuntu needs to resist the urge to play Extend and Extinguish (by accident). There was scuttle that Ubuntu wasn't properly sending their stuff back down to the Debian core to be merged.
Re: someone's comment on the Best of Debian, it would be interesting if Ubuntu and Mint and ____ and ____ all unified, and made 1 click options on the Debian Install "If you click this it will be easier but less pure."
I like the concept described above of Debian being almost an academic, theoretical distro, then externalize all the tweaks for newer users. I get the whole purity argument, and I only plead lack of ability to do it right, so I need the "crutches".
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
That nails down another thing about Debian. I just don't want to run some bloatware at servers, thank you RH and SUSE. I also don't want that server to start missbehaving from times to times just because I didn't use the (GUI) distro sanctioned config application. Config application? WTF if you want to make some application that makes my life easier, thank you (but I probably won't use it if it is a GUI), but oblying people to use those applications is another thing completely, and making them GUI based, and not scriptable is stupid.
On the desktop, by the other side, I like KDE (3, didn't try 4 yet but will probably update now that squeeze is out) quite well.
Rethinking email
Well, the target groups are different. Debian never was really good at addressing the needs of Linux illiterates. Ubuntu wasn't exactly the first fork. I think part of the problem is that you have to cut some things in order to make it simpler (or otherwise spend an eternity trying to keep flexibility), and in Debian, well, people don't want to upset users who can claim legitimate needs.
Ubuntu on the other hand has always been about saying no and focusing on a target group. It's easier for them to make Things Just Work (minus bugs of course) without configuration or stupid questions. The dark side of it is that if you have a problem and it's not a typical target group problem, then you're in trouble.
That's why I'm running Ubuntu on my desktop at work, but Debian (testing) on the server. I didn't want to spend forever setting up the desktop, and I don't want to have a packaging problem with some software on the server and have it closed or ignored because the Ubuntu package maintainer is hired by Canonical to maintain a gazillion packages and this one is not one of those the central administration has declared important. Better battle with a Debian geek who might need a beating with a clue bat but who at least cares.
Of course, over time, some of the differences vanish as both distributions improve. For instance, it's much easier to install Debian these days, and conversely there a lot more packages and package maintainers for Ubuntu than there used to be.
However, the target group Ubuntu is addressing is by far the biggest and the one with the most press. Still, Debian is a testament to the power of self-organization, just like Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap. Life without Debian would be sad.
I often find buggy packages in Debian stable. And those are normaly software that is buggy upstream, and kind of unique, not having any replacement available on other distros (without compiling the same bugged one) nor on Windows. The situation is so that I normaly report the bug upstream, instead of on Debian. I guess it is better to have buggy software that do some of the things that it should do than no software at all.
The amount of functionality available inside the Debian repositories would make (and normaly does make) .rmp users dizzy, and Windows users completely lost.
Rethinking email
Nano is the default editor for fresh Debian instalations, so I guess there are more than 6 people using it.
Rethinking email
That would work but I have ........... in OS class it was like 2000 lines of x86 assembler. Then I rewrote it in C to see the speed difference.
I had to use ASM because the timer's we had were buggy in C and kept skipping every few days on the time period, I'll dig the code up and send it to you.
Yes, but a whole lot slower and irritating with all those *you want to do something? Give me your password*-crap.
Hey, don't vote for the bean just cause its Dark roasted.
Ubuntu, change you can bean in.
I'm NOT better then anyone, just I run better Linux distro's
...and I am an Ubuntu user.
Something that becomes a strong influence for others does not lose any significance for having inspired something bigger or greater. It only becomes more significant.
Debian is MORE relevant now rather than less.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
If you're using Ubuntu (or Linux Mint, or Mepis...), you're really using Debian with some enhancements.
Oh, please. I hurt when I hear people saying Mepis, Knoppix, Xandros or whatever is Debian [except foo]. A non-insignicant portion of questions on Debian forums is about derivatives, please don't encourage. If your Debian-based distribution has some issue, Debian people most likely can't even help you. If the distribution you use is not Debian, then you're really *not* using Debian. Most people forking take Debian, remove half of it, add themes, a few "user-friendly" interfaces, a couple of bugs along the way, then proceed to shipping something twice more outdated that they won't maintain. If your problem is with an outdated piece of software, Debian people cannot help you. There are, however, some "distributions" that *are* Debian. These are called Debian Pure Blends, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_Pure_Blend
Debian and debian derived projects are for people that are to lazy to use a real Linux system.
Or perhaps for people whose time valuable to them.
I also really don't care if my computer is 5% faster with my own distro vs. Debian. The time it would take me to get that running is not worth the miniscule amount of extra time it takes for my browser to open and my email to load.
The confidence of ignorance will always overcome the indecision of knowledge.
He's not much of a geek if he doesn't know how to use apt-get source to get a source package that compiles to a deb.
Dilbert RSS feed
"If you want to call yourself a Linux user, take a LFS cd and start compiling, if your not going to make your own distro using LFS then grab a good distrobution that actually makes Linux use act the way it's meant to be used."
1. I don't think the kernel has an opinion.
2. You can't spell, your grammar is terrible, and your sentence structure is abhorrent. English fail.
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
I know I can't spell and I know my grammar is horrible, but thats what happens when you have a learning disability. If you want to write a book have fun, I don't. You apparently can't read in any capacity other then to correct my spelling and grammar. You just like every other person to respond has managed to pull sentences and quotes out of my post which don't exist. I never said the kernel has an opinion. It's one thing to have bad spelling it's completely another to see sentences and quotes which don't exist. Clearly your in the group of people who see the sentences which aren't there, get some help!!!!!
sorry I use ubuntu and really dont give a shit about it's grandparents
Or about punctuation.
"I know I can't spell and I know my grammar is horrible, but thats what happens when you have a learning disability."
That sort of thing runs in my family as well. Please accept my apology.
"I never said the kernel has an opinion."
That was hyperbole on my part. However, you certainly did talk about "how Linux is meant to be used," and "the right way" to use Linux, statements which simply have no basis in fact. Just because that's how you prefer to operate doesn't make it the "right way" or any other way the "wrong way."
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
I like you post, Thanks for your reply. To be correct i should really change the post I made to read my preferred GUN / Linux setup and not the generic. I respect your view point.
That particular bug, as it happens, has been fixed for squeeze. Debian now uses UUIDs rather than /dev/sd* entries to boot, by default, which does not have that problem.
It definitely still matters and Debian 6 Squeeze is the best version yet. My full review for desktop users here: http://desktoplinuxreviews.com/2011/02/12/debian-6-squeeze/
Jim Lynch
Tech Analyst and Community Manager