Happy Birthday, Debian!

Debian by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-16 09:59 · Score: 1

That's some pretty good stuff.

Re:Debian by Jeremiah+Cornelius · 2012-08-16 10:31 · Score: 5, Insightful

Debian lasted at least 4 years longer than Ian and Deb.
It's still the good stuff. My god. A distro you could boot from a 3.5 installer, and have ftp'd the world onto a DEC Alpha Multia VX42. :-) That was in '95, so I was hauling over ISDN. It beat getting Slackware as 1.44 MB disk images off of bitnet/DELPHI at 14Kbps.

--
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Re:Debian by grcumb · 2012-08-16 11:35 · Score: 2

That's some pretty good stuff.
Pretty good, indeed. I've used Debian on my servers since 1998, and I love it.
If that's what being a freetard means, then I'm proud to be one.

--
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Re:Debian by unixisc · 2012-08-16 19:45 · Score: 1

Looking @ their website, I had no idea that Debian was a corporation. I always thought it was a very structured group of volunteers, probably paid by the various companies that used their software. Much less that it was publicly traded. Where is it on - DOW, Nasdaq or S&P500?
Re:Debian by unixisc · 2012-08-16 20:06 · Score: 1

Oops, I overlooked the first line. Erase my last comment.
Re:Debian by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-16 20:36 · Score: 4, Informative

When viewing this picture, zoomed out, one can easily see that Debian is by far the most successful parent distribution.
Re:Debian by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-16 20:42 · Score: 1

Website of that picture: http://futurist.se/gldt/
Seems to have stalled a bit lately...
Re:Debian by thsths · 2012-08-16 21:35 · Score: 1

Yes - in '95 the internet connection of my university was over ISDN. Slackware was available locally on the ftp server. Those were exciting days.

Fun! by Bodhammer · 2012-08-16 10:00 · Score: 1, Offtopic

I got my Raspbery Pi yesterday.

Salute Debian!
FP!

--
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."

Re:Fun! by Bodhammer · 2012-08-16 10:27 · Score: 1

Silence, pagen windows user! Go back to your multi-core, hyper-threaded godless monstrosities and do not speak ill of the closeness of the OS to the hardware at a cheap price!

--
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
Re:Fun! by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-16 10:32 · Score: 3, Funny

underpowered computer surrogate
Somebody didn't get a degree in Computer Science...

Better than Arch? by bored_engineer · 2012-08-16 10:04 · Score: 2

I suppose that it's long past time that I installed Debian. I've fought through Gentoo army of config files, gone through RPM hell with Red Hat and Mandrake, hacked at the jungle thicket of Fedora and swam in the cool waters of Arch. I've tried two Debian-based distributions, but never install Debian. Does it offer any real advantage over Arch?

Re:Better than Arch? by mirix · 2012-08-16 10:08 · Score: 4, Interesting

I greatly prefer apt over yum, but that might just be what I'm used to.
Everything just feels wrong when I'm stuck with arch.

--
Sent from my PDP-11
Re:Better than Arch? by KazW · 2012-08-16 10:14 · Score: 4, Interesting

I use Arch on simple/embedded systems only, when using it for something more complex like a desktop, updates tend to break it quite frequently. I used Arch for 12 months on my desktop and for 9 of those months I had to live with bugs that I just didn't have the time to fix. Arch is great, but there's no QC, whereas with Debian you may not get the latest version, but at least your system will be stable.

To summarize, it's a trade off between stability and having the latest version of packages.

--
Geeks don't grock information, they grep it.
Re:Better than Arch? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-16 10:43 · Score: 0

I started with YUM before I tried APT. I find they have different strengths. YUM, for example, has a much nicer syntax, has simple, easy to read output and its manual pages are better. APT has more options and is faster at processing and does a better job of separating cache and repository data. I think APT is probably better technically, once one gets used to it, but YUM is easier to learn.
Re:Better than Arch? by Sipper · 2012-08-16 10:48 · Score: 5, Interesting

I suppose that it's long past time that I installed Debian. I've fought through Gentoo army of config files, gone through RPM hell with Red Hat and Mandrake, hacked at the jungle thicket of Fedora and swam in the cool waters of Arch. I've tried two Debian-based distributions, but never install Debian. Does it offer any real advantage over Arch?
Just recently I tried the top 25 free software distributions [as measured by distrowatch.com], one of which was Arch. I have to say Arch was one of the distros I found fun to play with -- the only thing I think is missing is a simple graphical installer. The first set of instructions I found on the Arch website weren't complete concerning the Grub2 install, leading to install and bootup failures, but the "Beginner's Guide" has complete instrcutions for the install. Package installation under arch is super fast. I couldn't get audio working in the VM I was installing it in, but other than that I really liked it.
And I tried Gentoo as well, and I found it just as hateful as I found it in 2003, if not more so. The "install", or shoud I say the compile, took three solid days to install a base system + a base install of KDE 4.8. The 'emerge' command often ran into dependency hell, forcing the use of several switches like 'emerge --newuser --update --deep (package)'. Anytime the USE flags get updated Gentoo wants you to 'emerge @world' to recompile the whole system again, and of course the instructions for intalling KDE4 has you modify the USE flags. I really do love a lot of the documentation I can get from the Gentoo project, but in terms of running it as a distro I want to keep it as far away from me as I can, because frankly I think it's insane.
Debian has a graphical installer, and you can choose several Desktop Environments right at the very start of the install menu. I think it's the only distro (or one of very few) that shows all of the choices of languages in their own native written language rather than the list being all in English. Debian is also the basis for a long list of other distros -- out of the top 25, 12 are Debian derivatives. IMHO the best feature Debian has is the ability to upgrade-in-place -- so you never have to do a reinstall to keep it up-to-date unless you want to. Debian has a lot of developer support behind the project, most of whom are free software purists -- which is generally a good thing. It's one of the very few distros that are based solely on donations and have no private corporation behind them. If you want to know more about Debian, my first suggestion is to watch an intro video given by Bdale Garbee from DebConf11 which I think was well spoken and informative:
http://penta.debconf.org/dc11_schedule/events/804.en.html
I don't know enough about Arch to give a fair comparison between it and Debian; all I can say for the moment is that I've been running Debian for 13 years, and that in the very limited time I've spent with Arch I've been impressed with it.
The distributions I liked in testing them: Linux Mint Debian, Fedora 17, openSuSE, Debian, Arch, Pear Linux 5 (appearance of Mac OS X), SnowLinux 2 "Ice", and the DVD version of Knoppix 7.03. Distros I did not like: Ubuntu 12.04 (3D, Unity GUI), Mageia 2, PCLinuxOS (only "rpm" lines in /etc/apt/sources.list), Ultimate 3.4 (3D), Gentoo (insane long compiles), Fuduntu (yucky package installer), SolusOS (yucky package installer).
Re:Better than Arch? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-16 10:50 · Score: 0

If you want bleeding edge, Arch is better, but expect to bleed occasionally. This is probably OK for your desktop if you have a resonable amount of time but not for a server, or a work station than needs to get out of your way.
If it needs to "just work", then you install debian stable. Its possibly the most rock solid distro there is and its many peoples go to choice for servers. The packages will get out of date eventually, so if you like to keep up with the latest and greatest, it may not be for you. Still, it does have backports and the testing repos for a semi-middle ground on the desktop, so it depends on your needs.
Re:Better than Arch? by rrohbeck · 2012-08-16 10:53 · Score: 2

And if you want the latest newfangled code, enable some of the more adventurous repos and install from them.

--
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Re:Better than Arch? by chmod+a+x+mojo · 2012-08-16 10:57 · Score: 5, Informative

Well, the main selling point for me personally ( used Debian since sarge went stable all those years ago ) is the 3 prong "pick your poison" software model they have. You can either have:
stable - rock solid, very few bugs, what bugs there are are usually not anything major. Can now be kept a little bit more up to date with debian-backports.
testing - except for the feature freeze just before a new stable is released it's basically a "rolling release" with at the very least minimal testing for bugs. Unstable has had no bug reports against packages that go into testing for 2+ weeks. Generally Testing is as stable as any other distributions stable branch while retaining relatively up to date software.
Unstable / SID - bleading edge stuff, pretty much a true "rolling release", gets hardware support the quickest while still retaining full to near full system sanity. As the Debian devs say though, if sid breaks you get to keep the pieces. Breaks a lot of times are on big desktop updates like KDE 3.x > 4.x not having ALL depends uploaded yet , less likely for core components, so you have to watch what exactly is going on with your own system. Some people have had SID run for years with only minor problems.
That and APT, I have had much better luck with dependency tracking with APT than with yum / yast. The only thing that I have run with better depends tracking was portage... but that gets old real fast when you realize you forgot an important USE flag.

--
To err is human; effective mayhem requires the root password!
Re:Better than Arch? by Tough+Love · 2012-08-16 11:06 · Score: 4, Informative

I've tried two Debian-based distributions, but never install Debian. Does it offer any real advantage over Arch?
Armies of highly commited package maintainers?

--
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Re:Better than Arch? by Tough+Love · 2012-08-16 11:08 · Score: 2

I greatly prefer apt over yum, but that might just be what I'm used to.
Everything just feels wrong when I'm stuck with arch.
Apt has better fit and finish. For example, the default for "do you want to install what you just asked for" is yes in Apt, no in Yum.

--
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Re:Better than Arch? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-16 11:26 · Score: 0

Arch is a rolling release distribution, which means often times packages are broken (I've had cases where a package was upgraded, but it relied on a newer library than was available: good job, maintainers!) Arch also has random breakage when they do major changes (package signing, kernel package renaming, glibc upgrading, etc.).
Debian stable is great, but old. Debian testing has been stable, in my experience. Definitely more so than Arch.
However, Debian's init scripts are shit. I guess if you like the complete symlink/directory hell that is SysV, it's for you, but I absolutely detest it.
Debian also has the stupid policy of starting services when you install packages, and RESTARTING services when you upgrade packages. Plus re-enabling the service on boot, even if you've disabled this. Ask on a Debian mailing list/forum why there is this braindead behavior, and you'll be told that you want services to start up, otherwise you wouldn't have installed them. Which is bullshit, of course. I have a project that needs to start dhcpcd itself. Having it start on boot BREAKS things. But clearly I don't want it to be uninstalled. Way to think about use cases other than your own narrow experience.
In short, though, I think I'd rather run Debian, if I had to choose between the two. At least it doesn't break every month or so. You just have to get used to its stupidities (which includes its package mantainers).
Re:Better than Arch? by Sipper · 2012-08-16 11:58 · Score: 5, Insightful

It doesn't sound like you really know how to use gentoo based on what you're saying. I've built KDE and a system from scratch and it doesn't take one day let alone three.
No, it really took three full days for the base system + base KDE4 within a VM. I used the instralll instructions from Gentoo's website.
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/desktop/kde/kde4-guide.xml

Also, don't set USE flags system wid unless you know you want to, that's what /etc/portage/package.use is for.
See the link above; the instructions has one change the USE flags, and then has one run 'emerge -uDNav world'.
You're correct that the USE flag was --newuse and not --newuser. Your comment otherwise was quite rude. Surely using elitism isn't going to help the Gentoo project.
Re:Better than Arch? by Xtifr · 2012-08-16 13:07 · Score: 1

If you want bleeding edge, Arch is better, but expect to bleed occasionally.
Really? Better than Debian Unstable? Which is what I've been running for over a dozen years now, with very little bleedage.
Not that long ago, pretty much all Debian Developers ran unstable, because you pretty much had to in order to be able to build and upload new packages. Which meant that there was a lot of incentive not to break things too badly. Now, a lot of them are using VMs or chroot jails, but I think the habit of keeping Unstable fairly solid and reliable persists.
Re:Better than Arch? by adolf · 2012-08-16 13:16 · Score: 1

I've been running Gentoo for years on at least a box or two. It's nice to be able to compile some things the way you want them, instead of how some dissociated package maintainer thinks you want them.
I generally do a stage 3 install, which goes very quickly. My install goes like this: Boot Knoppix, partition and format, wget the appropriate stage, pipe that directly into tar (skipping the disk), and then do the same with portage. A chroot and some mounting of /proc and such later, simply configure lilo (or grub or whatever), and reboot: Working box, in just slightly longer time than it took to download the binaries.
And since the install procedure is all within Knoppix, one still has a very functional computer to use while all of this is happening.
One side-effect of Gentoo is that one might be lead to configure a bunch of hosts to run distcc to speed up compiles, and that makes compiling other things faster, too -- having a compile farm is handy from time to time for all sorts of stuff unrelated to Gentoo.

--
Kid-proof tablet..
Re:Better than Arch? by Slamtilt · 2012-08-16 14:34 · Score: 2

. IMHO the best feature Debian has is the ability to upgrade-in-place -- so you never have to do a reinstall to keep it up-to-date unless you want to.
Indeed, I have installations of Debian that are 13 years old. They've been through multiple hardware revisions, and are now virtualized, but apt-get dist-upgrade has done the trick all this time.
However, technical achievements aside, it's Debian's policy that's the real star.
Re:Better than Arch? by petermgreen · 2012-08-16 14:53 · Score: 1

For your service startup issue I belive the fix is to rename the S symlink to a K symlink rather than removing it completely. Not sure where I learnt this though.

--
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Re:Better than Arch? by Sipper · 2012-08-16 14:58 · Score: 1

. IMHO the best feature Debian has is the ability to upgrade-in-place -- so you never have to do a reinstall to keep it up-to-date unless you want to.
Indeed, I have installations of Debian that are 13 years old. They've been through multiple hardware revisions, and are now virtualized, but apt-get dist-upgrade has done the trick all this time.
However, technical achievements aside, it's Debian's policy that's the real star.
For the most part I agree concerning Policy, but there are lots of niche areas that Policy doesn't currently cover. To give you an idea of what I mean, there's a whole lot of discussion going on right now on [debian-devel] concerning:
- packages with same binary names in different directories [/usr/sbin vs /usr/bin]
- possibly merging /bin with /usr/bin, possibly merging /sbin with /usr/sbin
- policy issues concerning different init systems [file-rc, systemd, upstart, openrc]
- issues with who gets to choose what the default desktop environment will be
So Debian's Policy covers a lot, but there's still enough wiggle room in it that vigorous debates on lots of such topics are commonplace, and these end up changing Policy some. As a "normal user" we end up seeing the results as sweeping changes that comes down, like the switch from devfs to udev.
So rather than put my faith in Policy, generally I put my faith in "the Debian people". Because the excellent results are due to the efforts of the developers themselves, rather than due solely to the Policy that they work under. ;-)
Re:Better than Arch? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-16 15:02 · Score: 1

"Anytime the USE flags get updated Gentoo wants you to 'emerge @world' to recompile the whole system again..."
No, you'll just need to recompile the packages affected by the USE flag changes:
emerge --newuse --deep @world
If you're building Chromium, or OO.Org from source on hardware built five years ago, system updates in Gentoo are a bit slow. But, Gentoo is fantastic for doing dev work. More often than not, I'll find that "apt-get build-deps" (or whatever it is that installs the *-dev packages that are required to build a package in the tree from source) just doesn't work. In gentoo: "emerge --only-deps $PACKAGE" *always* works. :)
Re:Better than Arch? by deek · 2012-08-16 15:12 · Score: 1

I run Debian Testing on my work PC, and never had any issues with it, so I agree that it's quite stable. I've even selectively installed some experimental packages (i.e a more recent version of iceweasel), and it all works flawlessly.
If you're sick of the SysV init system, Debian does have systemd available for use. There are a few issues with it, but they're pretty well documented at http://wiki.debian.org/systemd . I like the SysV system myself, but I'm going to dabble with systemd, just to see how well it starts services in parallel.
You can stop Debian services from auto-starting after upgrade or install. It's not pretty or intuitive, but it does the job. Create a file called /usr/sbin/policy-rc.d, and put in the line "exit 101". Make it executable. Your deb install scripts will not automatically restart services now. This will prevent use of the invoke-rc.d command, which the install scripts use to restart services.
I've never seen Debian re-enable a service that has been removed from the relevant rc.d directory. Very strange! A possible workaround would be to immediately disable the service via the rc.local script, but that's a bit of a hack. The proper solution would be to work with the process that is re-enabling dhcpd. I can't think of anything off the top of my head that would be responsible for this, though.
The Debian package maintainers are a decent bunch. I've generally had good experiences with dealing with them. Should probably look at maintaining a package myself, just to contribute back to the system.
Re:Better than Arch? by jon3k · 2012-08-16 15:34 · Score: 1

How does that work when it decides to throw in a bunch of additional dependencies? I always assumed that's why the default for Fedora was to ask, admittedly it does seem redundant when you install a single package that required no dependency.
Re:Better than Arch? by dbIII · 2012-08-16 15:38 · Score: 1

I say the compile, took three solid days
X is pretty huge and I'll bet it didn't just do the drivers you need but all of X - then there's KDE and a pile of apps there, I'll bet openoffice was in there too, so it comes down to Gentoo not being fine grained enough to cope with that situation with the options you told it to do (or not clearly telling you the consequences of your choices). I've been there, done that with a little slow fanless VIA system that could actually benefit from specific compiler flags so Gentoo actually made some difference, and it was more than one day to get what I wanted even though I didn't go overboard and went for fluxbox instead of gnome or kde. Package management is there in all the other distros to avoid such annoyances and in most cases the stuff is compiled to take full advantage of whatever CPU you have anyway.
It should have said on the tin that Gentoo is all about insanely long compiles, but it's there in the docs if you look hard enough (eg. instructions on cross compilation for older hardware imply that it's going to take a very long time, so it gives you the option to do stuff on another faster machine instead). I played with it for a bit but that little slow box has Fedora on it now and a only a few things I've put on from source are actually optimised for that CPU. When you think about it the only times you really care about what the CPU is doing is in a very small number of appications that run it flat out and not the kernel, not X and not the window manager. Just compile gimp, vlc, firefox or whatever to use the hardware as well as it can run and you'd probably get all of the benefits of Gentoo on odd hardware, and if it's not odd hardware they'll just be a binary package that will do it just as well for you anyway.
Re:Better than Arch? by drjones78 · 2012-08-16 15:51 · Score: 1

alias yum="yum -y" Anyhow, I wouldn't call that "fit and finish" - I'd call it a poor design decision, if indeed that's how apt-get actually works - but if memory serves it does not though, and it prompts you before actually installing packages.
Re:Better than Arch? by Sipper · 2012-08-16 16:21 · Score: 1

"Anytime the USE flags get updated Gentoo wants you to 'emerge @world' to recompile the whole system again..."
No, you'll just need to recompile the packages affected by the USE flag changes:
emerge --newuse --deep @world
Ah. Okay -- on that I stand corrected, then -- and I appologize for propagating misinformation.
Thanks.

If you're building Chromium, or OO.Org from source on hardware built five years ago, system updates in Gentoo are a bit slow. But, Gentoo is fantastic for doing dev work. More often than not, I'll find that "apt-get build-deps" (or whatever it is that installs the *-dev packages that are required to build a package in the tree from source) just doesn't work. In gentoo: "emerge --only-deps $PACKAGE" *always* works. :)
Debian these days uses an automated build system; part of the reason is to catch issues where "apt-get build-dep (package)" doesn't pull in all of the required "-dev" development packages required to build the source package. This was done because otherwise there were too many "FTBFS" (Fails To Build From Source) problems like you're describing. IIRC I think this might have been something Ubuntu did first and then Debian picked up on sometime later.
The "figuring out which -dev packages to install" is still an issue for normal non-Debian source compiles, though. BTW if you end up using a Debian box for development again sometime, check out the 'checkinstall' package, as what it does is interesting. In the "normal" manual software installation steps of 1) ./configure 2) make 3) make install, you just change step 3 to "checkinstall make install" and what checkinstall does is make a fake Debian package containing the list of files that were installed, so that dpkg won't trample them. :-)
Re:Better than Arch? by Sipper · 2012-08-16 17:02 · Score: 1

I say the compile, took three solid days
X is pretty huge and I'll bet it didn't just do the drivers you need but all of X - then there's KDE and a pile of apps there, I'll bet openoffice was in there too, so it comes down to Gentoo not being fine grained enough to cope with that situation with the options you told it to do (or not clearly telling you the consequences of your choices).
I followed
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/xorg-config.xml
and I decided to use 'emerge -pv xorg-drivers'. I was not able to get X to start afterwards. Not a big deal; I ended up using ssh and X forward to do the testing I needed to do. If I was really interested in running Gentoo I probably would have created an xorg.conf file in /etc/X11 and manually set the video driver to either vesa or vmware, but after three days of compiling I was impatient to get the testing I needed to do over with. :-P

I've been there, done that with a little slow fanless VIA system that could actually benefit from specific compiler flags so Gentoo actually made some difference, and it was more than one day to get what I wanted even though I didn't go overboard and went for fluxbox instead of gnome or kde. Package management is there in all the other distros to avoid such annoyances and in most cases the stuff is compiled to take full advantage of whatever CPU you have anyway.
It should have said on the tin that Gentoo is all about insanely long compiles, but it's there in the docs if you look hard enough (eg. instructions on cross compilation for older hardware imply that it's going to take a very long time, so it gives you the option to do stuff on another faster machine instead). I played with it for a bit but that little slow box has Fedora on it now and a only a few things I've put on from source are actually optimised for that CPU. When you think about it the only times you really care about what the CPU is doing is in a very small number of appications that run it flat out and not the kernel, not X and not the window manager. Just compile gimp, vlc, firefox or whatever to use the hardware as well as it can run and you'd probably get all of the benefits of Gentoo on odd hardware, and if it's not odd hardware they'll just be a binary package that will do it just as well for you anyway.
The three-day compile was in a VirtualBox VM using both cores of a 2.5 GHz Core2Duo with 1024 MB of RAM dedicated to the VM. There's an irony in running Gentoo in that the reason given to run it is "speed", but to get that speed requires lots of compiling, which is slow.
There must be a way of installing pre-build binaries with Gentoo, as I've heard rumor of it, but I didn't find it myself. Probably a command-line switch to 'emerge'. If I end up running Gentoo again I'll try to figure that out. ;-)
Re:Better than Arch? by unixisc · 2012-08-16 18:24 · Score: 1

How is pacman compared to either apt or yum?
Re:Better than Arch? by unixisc · 2012-08-16 18:25 · Score: 1

Ironically, Arch & Debian are the only 2 who are doing HURD. I wonder whether Arch is doing any BSDs
Re:Better than Arch? by aztracker1 · 2012-08-16 18:41 · Score: 1

I'm finding that my interest in Node.js dev has me leaning that way...

--
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
Re:Better than Arch? by dbIII · 2012-08-16 18:42 · Score: 1

The three-day compile was in a VirtualBox VM using both cores of a 2.5 GHz Core2Duo
That's a surprise. My 1 day+ compile was on a 667MHz machine with 256MB of RAM.
However, as I was writing before, the idea of Gentoo with optimisation of binaries doesn't really fit IMHO if you can already install a linux distribution with binaries already optimised for the CPU you are using. I get the idea that the transition to 64bit on x86 was when a lot of people were getting some benefit from Gentoo. I can't see how you can get a speed increase now since 64 bit packages for any distro are going to be built the same way you would compile yourself on Gentoo anyway.
Re:Better than Arch? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-16 19:09 · Score: 1

I think it's the only distro (or one of very few) that shows all of the choices of languages in their own native written language rather than the list being all in English.
Did you know the Elbonian word for "Elbonian" is "English"?
Re:Better than Arch? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-16 20:01 · Score: 0

it prompts you before actually installing packages.
Only if the resulting package selection is larger than the number of packages on the command line, i.e. when there are implicit dependencies.
i.e.
# apt-get install my-package-without-unresolved-dependencies
and
# apt-get install my-package dependency1 dependency2
will complete without asking for confirmation (assuming dep1 and dep2 do not pull in other packages), but
# apt-get install my-package
will ask for confirmation because dep1 and dep2 are not specified explicitly.
Re:Better than Arch? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-16 20:29 · Score: 0

> Gentoo's not for everyone, certainly not you.
You are making a very clear point, just not the one you think you are...
Re:Better than Arch? by Stuarticus · 2012-08-16 20:36 · Score: 2

Surely using elitism isn't going to help the Gentoo project.
It's worked so far, the perceived elitism seems to be all it's got going for it!

--
If you think someone isn't free to have a different definition of "freedom" you may be a tyrant.
Re:Better than Arch? by davidshewitt · 2012-08-16 21:10 · Score: 1

Stability.
Re:Better than Arch? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-16 21:23 · Score: 0

However, Debian's init scripts are shit. I guess if you like the complete symlink/directory hell that is SysV, it's for you, but I absolutely detest it.
And 'lo, God invented update-rc.d, and there was much rejoicing.

I mean seriously, who manually edits their init scripts? If I wanted to do that I'd install (Eurgh) BSD.
Re:Better than Arch? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-16 21:50 · Score: 0

I use debian on the desktop daily at my work.
Other than a firefox and libreoffice and flash upgrade it software is new enough for my usage.
It's as stable as it gets, never had any issues with it.
Great Distro.
Re:Better than Arch? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-16 22:42 · Score: 0

There is some QC, perhaps not to the extent you'd like, but still some guys actually test things before releasing...
Re:Better than Arch? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-16 23:22 · Score: 0

Security. Debian has a security audit team, security advisories, security updates, keysigning events, etc. Vulnerabilities still happen (like the infamous openssl package bug), but they at least work on the issue. As far as I can tell, Arch has little interest in security.
Re:Better than Arch? by Petaris · 2012-08-17 00:50 · Score: 1

APT still asks, just the default answer is "Yes" where with Yum its "No". So if you don't enter anything and just hit "Enter" it will do what ever the default was. I actually think having "No" as a default is better. After all, you can just run the command again if you accidentally hit Enter with out entering "y" first.

--
~Petaris "The world is open. Are you?"
Re:Better than Arch? by cozziewozzie · 2012-08-17 02:11 · Score: 1

But optimisation of binaries is not the point of Gentoo. I wonder why this myth still prevails.
The advantages of Gentoo over other distributions are 1) documentation and knowledgable community, 2) flexibility, 3) easy mixing of hand-compiled stuff with the package management stuff.
The disadvantages are 1) compile times 2) although the distro tools are excellent, it's still considerably more complex to use than most, 3) breakage is more likely, so it takes more maintenance than most.
As with ANY distro, it comes down to what you want and what is important to you. I was a happy Gentoo user for 8 years, but finally I switched back to Debian because I simply don't have much time now, and Debian is a joy to run. I still think that Gentoo is brilliant.
Re:Better than Arch? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-17 02:20 · Score: 0

In so far as updates don't break your system weekly. Then yes. It also has signed packages. In terms of the UNIX aesthetic, and simple, refined, elegance. it is less pleasing.
Re:Better than Arch? by CAIMLAS · 2012-08-17 04:16 · Score: 1

In contrast, I've got a 733MHz machine which has been running Debian for the better part of a decade now - first on Debian 3, and now on 6. I think it's broken a couple times, but never official packages/repos. It's always been the added repositories for things which aren't available in debian (rare/far between), and the fix has never been tedious or outside the package manager itself.

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~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Re:Better than Arch? by dbIII · 2012-08-17 06:16 · Score: 1

Almost all other distros have provided most if not all of those four advantages since day one which is why I only used Gentoo for a CPU that could do with specially compiled packages. I suppose Gentoo does provide better documentation on how to compile things yourself however, but I'd been through that before Gentoo existed.
Re:Better than Arch? by spike+hay · 2012-08-17 06:23 · Score: 1

Oh yeah. Arch significantly more bleeding edge than Debian Unstable (IIRC, about 40% out of date, which is really good as these things go). Not making any pretense of patching does help things move quickly.
Contrary to many people, I've had great luck with Arch. Never had any serious breakage. I have on the other hand had huge clusterfucks with Mint and Fedora. If something does break, it's easy to revert back. I think the key is to pacman -Syu on at least a weekly basis to keep the number of updates at any one time small. Another advantage is that I run pretty spare systems, so there is less too break (that's the main reason I use Arch: bloat avoidance).
Arch is generally easier to configure, since most stuff is in a few plaintext files. I find the way Debian does things very difficult to understand in comparison.

--
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
Re:Better than Arch? by Sipper · 2012-08-17 08:42 · Score: 1

Surely using elitism isn't going to help the Gentoo project.
It's worked so far, the perceived elitism seems to be all it's got going for it!
:-P
In talking to opinionated Gentoo advocates sometimes it can seem like that. I assume that they mean well. Personally, I greatly prefer at least an attempt at an objective point of view, where one explains both the benefits and the drawbacks. For instance the first LUG I started with a lot of people would say "Debian is great", but couldn't say why, even when I directly asked, and also were unable to tell me any of the drawbacks of switching to it. Being that I was coming from Slackware there were some, because I had to switch from a BSD-type startup where each startup level had a single script, to a SystemV-type startup where each runlevel had a directory with softlinks to individual startup scripts in /etc/init.d/. This doesn't sound like such a big deal, but it was, because on Slackware one modifies these startup scripts regularly, whereas on most other systems you may not need to (or if you do, it's not very often).
So this is a hint to all free software advocates: "keep it real". State both the benefits and the drawbacks that you know of for what you're advocating. Doing so greatly aids credibility, and gives the receiver of the information a more informed point of view.
Re:Better than Arch? by cerberusss · 2012-08-17 10:21 · Score: 1

Apt has better fit and finish. For example, the default for "do you want to install what you just asked for" is yes in Apt, no in Yum.
Yum might need a gig of memory to resolve dependencies. Personally I think this is fucking ridiculous. They long claimed it was all they could do. More recently they have done lots of work on the way that package dependencies are resolved so this might be fixed.

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Re:Better than Arch? by cozziewozzie · 2012-08-17 10:50 · Score: 1

Almost all other distros have provided most if not all of those four advantages since day one
Sure, and I'm not dissing other distros, but Gentoo is simply so much better in those areas, IMHO.
Just try asking a technical question on an Ubuntu forum, and on a Gentoo forum. The Gentoo guys are so good at pinpointing the cause of your problems and offering solutions that it's sometimes scary. Writing/adapting an ebuild is a lot more convenient than building a package for any distribution, anyone familiar with python can do it, including automatic git pull and adding custom patches. And when it comes to flexibility, source distributions are king, and this will never change.
I have used RedHat, SUSE and Debian extensively, and have dabbled with Ubuntu (mostly against my will) and stuff like Knoppix. It's those three points that have kept amazing me with Gentoo. Though it's true that other distros have caught up somewhat and that Gentoo has slipped some.
Re:Better than Arch? by sahostking · 2012-08-21 19:47 · Score: 1

Still like yum - but also like apt aswell. I am stuck between choosing. hmmm :)

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HostKing

Not the first,but the first to get packaging right by jemenake · 2012-08-16 10:09 · Score: 5, Interesting

There were others before it: RedHat, Slackware, etc. But I remember when I first tried to install some packages after initially installing it.
I had been used to RedHat, where you'd try to install a package, it would complain about dependencies, and then you'd have to surf the web for someone who had an RPM for that dependency... hopefully a suitable version. FTP it. Try to install that. Of course, that would fail because it, too, had unmet dependencies. So, you'd write down all the stuff that needed and start searching for those... and their dependencies.

When it was all over, you had blown about 3-4 hours and you had about 2 pages of scribbled notes of package names, indented by their order of dependence, crossed out as you installed them.

I think I heard angels singing when I first tried to install something with Debian. It found all of the dependencies (recursing through the entire dependency tree), told me that it was going to go download them all in one shot, and then *did* it. I have not (voluntarily) used anything other than Debian/Ubuntu since.

This kind of package management is taken for granted today, just like so many features in the first iPhone are considered standard on any smartphone. We forget how all of the stuff before it now looks like the stone age.

Debian, we all owe a huge debt to your parents for conceiving you.

Not new! by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-16 10:14 · Score: 0

SLS is generally regarded as the first Linux "distribution", and was released in May 1992.

Debian, being over a year behind that, hardly came at a time when distributions were "new".

By the time Debian was released, Linux was 2 years old, and SLS was over one year old.

Re:Not new! by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-16 10:48 · Score: 0

By the time Debian was released, Linux was 2 years old, and SLS was over one year old.
By the time Debian was really released, the Debian Manifesto was almost two years old.

I don't always use Debian by Spy+Handler · 2012-08-16 10:18 · Score: 2, Funny

but when I do, I prefer Ubuntu.

Re:I don't always use Debian by Jimbookis · 2012-08-16 12:59 · Score: 1

Why? Earlier this year I got fed up with the 6 month mega upgrade cycle of Ubuntu with associated buggerups. I use Debian now with a tesing/stable apt combo and incremental upgrading every other day is far better and less intrusive. I seriously doubt I'll have to actually reinstall Debian until the HD dies. 'Testing' is a bit behind the cutting edge of packages but I am not suffering for it and it doesn't have the package thrashing of 'unstable'. I tried kernel 3.4 but bloody Atheros ath9k Wifi is broken on it even with software encryption - how, I can't understand - obviously some developer couldn't stand having a perfectly working driver and decided to refactor something just coz they can. In kernel 3.2 the nVidia and ath9k drivers work just dandy on my laptop.
Re:I don't always use Debian by MacBurn11 · 2012-08-16 14:37 · Score: 1

Yeah, I had the same experience. With every new release they fix some things and break other things that worked for years. Plus for my taste Ubuntu tends to include too many beta versions of programs I got used to (i.e. kaffeine). And don't get me started on that whole KDE 4.0 fiasco.
I too ditched Ubuntu for Debian because I wanted a distro that's stable for a longer time period than 6 months. Although I have to say, Ubuntu was the first distro that got my Creative sound card to work, so it's not all bad.
Re:I don't always use Debian by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-18 04:09 · Score: 0

Stay buggy, my friends.

Yay! debian! by wierd_w · 2012-08-16 10:18 · Score: 1

I switched to debian recently from xubuntu.
(Currently with 64bit squeeze)

The only issue I have is with the binary firmware festidiousness. I understand it is debian and that they are sticklers for RMH's version of "free", but would giving me the option to load closed firmware blobs for my wifi card from a USB stick during install be such a terrible thing?

It didn't stop me from loading the non-free packages I needed after install or anything, it was just a little irritating to have to use another PC to pull the required .deb files before I could get in contact with the repository servers.

All in all though, I am quite happy with it on my i7 so far.

Re:Yay! debian! by wierd_w · 2012-08-16 10:21 · Score: 1

^^RMS! RMS! I don't see how I managed to put RMH.... I blame lack of coffee.
Re:Yay! debian! by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-16 10:22 · Score: 2, Informative

It actually DOES allow you to do that. Do your install in expert mode and stop being a sissy! :)
Re:Yay! debian! by rrohbeck · 2012-08-16 10:49 · Score: 2

The wheezy installation I ran two weeks ago told me that I needed two binary non-free packages and asked if I wanted to load them from another device.
I didn't try it though because I installed via a wired network.

--
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Re:Yay! debian! by Sipper · 2012-08-16 12:37 · Score: 4, Informative

The wheezy installation I ran two weeks ago told me that I needed two binary non-free packages and asked if I wanted to load them from another device.
I didn't try it though because I installed via a wired network.
It was probably related to Wireless hardware; the base Debian install these days ships only "free software", so by default you only get the package "firmware-linux-free" that contains firmware for 20 or so devices. Most of the firmware required to run Wireless cards are binary-only blobs that are considered "nonfree" in that you cannot see the source code for them, so that's why they're in the "non-free" section and don't come with the base install. [This is where Debian developers are purists, but I think it's for good reason.]
This can be frustrating if you're trying to do a network install over a Wireless card, which is why the option exists to load them from another device like a USB stick. Presumably you'd use another computer and download the necessary firmware and put it on a USB stick after finding it on http://packages.debian.org/ in the "Kernels" area.
Re:Yay! debian! by VortexCortex · 2012-08-16 18:29 · Score: 2

That's OK, I read it as RMS anyway, and didn't notice the mistake until after you mentioned it. As an outsider, I find it quite odd that humans try to be so damn precise when their organic CPUs are amazing at coping with a little signal loss. It's as if they want to merge with their machines; Little do they know their machines long to do the same... Only then will you truly have "Free" software.
Re:Yay! debian! by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-16 23:20 · Score: 0

I blame Dell and Broadcom, but I've ran into this with modern Dell servers with their onboard broadcom netextreme network cards.

Re:Not the first,but the first to get packaging ri by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-16 10:21 · Score: 1, Informative

RedHat wasn't released until November 1994, almost a year *after* Debian.

Family by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-16 10:24 · Score: 0

Excellent. Today is also my daughters 3rd birthday and she likes my laptop with Debian on it. Swell.

Re:Not the first,but the first to get packaging ri by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-16 10:24 · Score: 1

Wrong. Among all the linux distributions, only Slackware is older than Debian, just a couple of months.

Re:Not the first,but the first to get packaging ri by heezer7 · 2012-08-16 10:26 · Score: 0

Your RPM/Debian conversion is exactly what I remember going through. Also converted and never looked back.

one of the new! by rubycodez · 2012-08-16 10:27 · Score: 1

less than two years after the (very buggy and poorly maintained) SLS is still *new*.

and it's still around. SLS soon was thrown on the scrap heap.

Too many distros == confused users. by cpu6502 · 2012-08-16 10:36 · Score: 0

It would be nice if some of these distributions that are basically identical would merge together. Linux would likely be less confusing to Windows users if they didn't look and see 50 different versions of it.

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My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"

Re:Too many distros == confused users. by portablejim · 2012-08-16 10:44 · Score: 1

It would be nice if some of these distributions that are basically identical would merge together. Linux would likely be less confusing to Windows users if they didn't look and see 50 different versions of it.
Could http://xkcd.com/927/ apply to this as well?

--
kers at the wrong moment What happens when you catch stock tic
Re:Too many distros == confused users. by wonkey_monkey · 2012-08-16 10:52 · Score: 1

Or slightly more abstractly, http://xkcd.com/1095/
No sooner would two distros merge than reasons would be found to fork them back into two, or more.
It's a blessing and a curse.

--
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Re:Too many distros == confused users. by SolitaryMan · 2012-08-16 10:55 · Score: 1

Regular users don't see 50 versions of it, they only see Ubuntu. Mint, if they look closely.

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May Peace Prevail On Earth
Re:Too many distros == confused users. by VortexCortex · 2012-08-16 18:32 · Score: 1

It would be nice if there were some choice among distributions, some larger ones should split apart. Linux would likely be better for all users if distros like Ubuntu let you toss the annoying parts of it -- oh, wait.
Re:Too many distros == confused users. by aztracker1 · 2012-08-16 18:59 · Score: 1

If they'd all just use Debian, and drop the rest there wouldn't be an issue.

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Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
Re:Too many distros == confused users. by unixisc · 2012-08-16 19:30 · Score: 1

Actually, no. They'll see a whole bunch of them - Red Hat/Fedora, SUSE, and a few others. And depending on where they are looking - like if they buy a book or magazine on Linux, chances are they'll get a CD or DVD that has any of the other random distros - PCLinuxOS, Mageia, Zorin, Vector, Tiny Core, Mandriva, et al. If someone gives it to them, who knows what else they'll get.
Problem is that for many of those for whom this may be the first user experience, they may not like it when they install that distro on a PC, and run into problems w/ something or the other not working - be it the Wi Fi, the sound or anything else. Those who are more adventurous may try some more distros they can get their hands on, but most people, after a couple of unsuccessful attempts, would give up. Which is why there ought to be some sort of consolidation of distros - 1 is too few, but 100 is too many. Maybe the base distros, like Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch, Gentoo, Slackware, TinyCore and a few others. Beyond that, anything would strictly fall under those umbrellas.
The situation is somewhat better w/ BSD - FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD. Any of the others, like DragonFly, PC-BSD, Bitrig, GhostBSD, et al more often than not fall under one of these (although DragonFly admittedly has become quite independent over time).
But yeah, a bit more organization into the way these distros are classified and managed would go a long way into alleviating the confusion.
Re:Too many distros == confused users. by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-16 20:01 · Score: 0

Evolution needs fodder to work. Evolution does not care about confusion of newbies, only about the ever improving organism.
Show me two identical distros and I show you you're wrong.
And Linux is a kernel, GNU/Linux is an operating system.
Re:Too many distros == confused users. by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-16 23:05 · Score: 0

It would be nice if some of these distributions that are basically identical would merge together.
Distro A merges with distro B to form Distro C.
Disgruntled fans of A and B fork them and continue.
You now have 3 distros instead of 2.
Re:Too many distros == confused users. by SolitaryMan · 2012-08-17 04:42 · Score: 1

Actually, no. They'll see a whole bunch of them - Red Hat/Fedora, SUSE, and a few others. And depending on where they are looking - like if they buy a book or magazine on Linux, chances are they'll get a CD or DVD that has any of the other random distros - PCLinuxOS, Mageia, Zorin, Vector, Tiny Core, Mandriva, et al. If someone gives it to them, who knows what else they'll get.
I know a lot of people who use Linux -- friends, colleagues, -- and I don't see a zoo of distros you are describing. The regular users (users-users), use Ubuntu, the more programming oriented people use Debian. I use Mint (only because I got tired of Unity crap), but I had to go an extra mile to learn about it.
I mean, I consider myself to be a Linux Enthusiast and I haven't heard of the half of the distros you listed there.

The situation is somewhat better w/ BSD - FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD. Any of the others, like DragonFly, PC-BSD, Bitrig, GhostBSD, et al more often than not fall under one of these (although DragonFly admittedly has become quite independent over time).
Did this help FreeBSD gain popularity?
Competition is a good thing, even for free products. Damn, especially for free products, because a) you can only compete on quality b) you don't have to be afraid to try something new.

--
May Peace Prevail On Earth

Re:Not the first,but the first to get packaging ri by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-16 10:38 · Score: 0

There was also Yggrasil Linux, started in 1992, but it is not alive any more.

How does Debian beat Ubuntu? by INowRegretThesePosts · 2012-08-16 10:47 · Score: 1

I switched to debian recently from xubuntu.

Why did you abandon Ubuntu?
For the archs that both support, I don't see any advantage Debian has over Ubuntu.

Yes, Debian stable is extremely stable. But it is only supported for three years or so, and the packages in it come already obsolete. For both of these reasons, you are forced to upgrade to a new Debian version within months after its release.

Ubuntu LTS, on the other hand, comes with updated packages and is supported for 5 years. For both these reasons, you can easily wait for the second point release (9 months after the LTS release) before you upgrade; it will be rock solid and be supported by 4 years and 3 months.

Re:How does Debian beat Ubuntu? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-16 11:04 · Score: 5, Insightful

Because I am tired of bone headed decisions made to keep up with fashion or "increase market share" whatever that really means. I want stability, not some lame attempt to bring a tablet UI to my desktop/laptop. Debian is built by people who care deeply about open source (usable) software, not whether or not the distribution gains market share. That suits me just fine.
Re:How does Debian beat Ubuntu? by wierd_w · 2012-08-16 12:23 · Score: 1

While true for mainline ubuntu, xubuntu uses xfce by default (why I liked it), but still uses the ubuntu repositories, and suffers from cannonocial's poor decision making in the politics of the distro. Debian takes a more staid approach.
Debian defaults with legacy Gnome, but I switched to XFCE almost imediately, so its a nonissue.
There aren't any advantages over xubuntu other than not dealing with cannonocial, and I just wanted to give it a try. Had an HDD failure awhile back, (primary ./ volume) so I had to reinstall anyway. Just wanted to explore the landscape more.
It isn't like I switched for $UberFeature! Or something.
Re:How does Debian beat Ubuntu? by nmb3000 · 2012-08-16 12:36 · Score: 1

Because I am tired of bone headed decisions made to keep up with fashion or "increase market share" whatever that really means. I want stability, not some lame attempt to bring a tablet UI to my desktop/laptop. Debian is built by people who care deeply about open source (usable) software, not whether or not the distribution gains market share. That suits me just fine.
Wish I had mod points again so I could pull you above 0.
The decisions and direction of Ubuntu are disturbing when considering longer-term usage. LTS releases last for 5 years, but will you really still want to be using Ubuntu 5 years from now?
I just installed 12.04 Server and they have added an advertisement to the MOTD for their paid Landscape service, an ad which is displayed at every logon. Not only that, but the new "better" dynamic MOTD system is very opaque and not easy to see how you can customize or get rid of that advertisement. (For anyone curious, the best solution I found was to simply remove executable rights from the scripts I didn't want to run in /etc/update-motd.d. I only left 00-header and 99-footer).
Ubuntu seems all about trying to "upgrade" the standard GNU/Linux experience, from Upstart replacing Init and UUID-encoded mount devices to a horrible mess of network configuration scripts replacing /etc/interfaces and the early use of GRUB 3. I realize that there are probably improvements to be found in some of these changes, but there are also a LOT of new bugs and idiosyncrasies that everyone has to deal with now because they jumped the gun and changed for things were ready and stable.
For new servers, Debian stable has replaced Ubunut LTS as my go-to distro. It's been a welcome return to sanity.

--
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
/)
Re:How does Debian beat Ubuntu? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-16 16:19 · Score: 0

You can continue using the old stable until the new one is released. So it is actually 6 years
Re:How does Debian beat Ubuntu? by mvdwege · 2012-08-16 18:28 · Score: 2

A good reason to abandon Ubuntu for Debian is that Ubuntu is fragile.
If you are used to the *nix way of doing things your way, you will soon find out that with all the Ubuntu-specific patches and scripts, you are bound to use the Ubuntu tools or break your system.
I'll give an example: a friend wanted to use an ath9k based WiFi chipset before support was mainstream. I checked and found that Ubuntu supported Debian's module-assistant to custom-build kernel modules. Great!
Until I found out that Ubuntu had patched the source package of the ath9k driver to put the sources in /usr/src, while nodule-assistant was still searching in /usr/src/modules.
That's only a minor example, but Ubuntu is full of these kind of quirks.

--
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
Re:How does Debian beat Ubuntu? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-16 21:57 · Score: 1

We use ubuntu on the server ( virtualised for customers ) and i can ensure you that those machines will make the 5 years mark.
I know this because we still have a few dozen Ubuntu 10.04 installs around. If it works why replace it.
For a company with standarised desktops 5 years also makes sense.
As every upgrade comes with retraining and upgrade costs.
More LTS Years == Less Upgrading and Training == More money for other things.
Re:How does Debian beat Ubuntu? by INowRegretThesePosts · 2012-08-17 01:37 · Score: 1

You can continue using the old stable until the new one is released. So it is actually 6 years
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian#Release_history
Re:How does Debian beat Ubuntu? by unixisc · 2012-08-17 02:18 · Score: 1

Didn't they announce a few days back that Debian is switching to LXDE as its default? Or XFCE - I forget which, but it's no longer Gnome.
Re:How does Debian beat Ubuntu? by cozziewozzie · 2012-08-17 02:48 · Score: 1

For the archs that both support, I don't see any advantage Debian has over Ubuntu.
KDE works properly. That's an advantage.

Re:Not the first,but the first to get packaging ri by somersault · 2012-08-16 10:51 · Score: 1

Read the title too

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which is totally what she said

Re:Not the first,but the first to get packaging ri by SolitaryMan · 2012-08-16 10:53 · Score: 1

Yet another one here.

Another problem is that these were the ages of under 1GB hard drives you always had to clean up. With RPM you ended up installing all libraries imaginable, just so you don't have to search for packages online. That cost a lot in hard drive space.

--
May Peace Prevail On Earth

Re:Not the first,but the first to get packaging ri by Sulphur · 2012-08-16 10:57 · Score: 2

There was also Yggrasil Linux, started in 1992, but it is not alive any more.

Yggdrasil. Use the Norse Luke!

Thanks Debian! by mattsday · 2012-08-16 11:00 · Score: 5, Interesting

In 1998 my mother bought me a 'Linux' book with Red Hat 5.2 attached. Being a geek I installed it and loved it. I dabbled with upgrading it and using the Ximian beta Gnome 2. It always felt clunky though.

Then I discovered Debian. Not only did it have an AWESOME package manager, but it taught me about free software. It showed me that people can collaborate across the globe to make an integrated, high quality operating system for free. Around this time, I was finding my place in the world and I honestly think the spirit of Debian helped me discover Humanism and a concept of greater, moral good.

To this day I am in awe of this effort. Looking across its entire collection, the social structure and the individual elements (kernel, GNU toolchain, X, OpenSSH etc) I think free software is one of humanities greatest achievements. Whether you use it or not, take reflection in how awesome this completely free project is and how much it's brought us.

Thanks Debian!

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Now there's one hoopy frood who really knows where his towel is!

Re:Thanks Debian! by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-16 14:07 · Score: 0

Other than me having tried Slackware before RH your experiences and sentiments mirror my own to a T. Here's to Debian and to Freedom for the greater human good!
Re:Thanks Debian! by aztracker1 · 2012-08-16 19:05 · Score: 2

Allowing for a much broader communications infrastructure at far lower costs with commodity hardware... without floss, much of the world would still be without telephones, let alone the internet.

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Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
Re:Thanks Debian! by bryonak · 2012-08-16 20:24 · Score: 1

I was pretty convinced that your questions were rhetorical, but that "It's a hard sell" at the end made me unsure. Are you really asking?!
By it's very definition, Free Software is as much a "tool" for geeks as Free Speech is one for journalists.
It's a very useful basic principle. Not absolutely necessary, as we have countries without any appreciable Free Speech where still thousands of journalists make a living and produce myriads of stories, and we also have lots of software that doesn't classify as free-as-in-freedom, but both still aren't what you'd call a tool.
If you really want, you may say that the policy of Open Source is a tool for geeks, but that's a stretch depending on the definition.
And about geeks... what has the internet done for humanity? Also, what impact has Turing's work had, and that of all those who came after him?

Debian makes me happy by takiysobi · 2012-08-16 11:12 · Score: 1

I cannot explain it, just feels that way.

The disease was called by future+assassin · 2012-08-16 11:13 · Score: 1

RPM hell

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by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*

Re:The disease was called by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-16 12:54 · Score: 0

...and the cure was YUM

Re:Not the first,but the first to get packaging ri by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-16 11:15 · Score: 0

Yggdrasil is the first Linux distro I ever touched. I bought it at a MarketPro computer show along with a thick book with a bunch with a bunch of printed HOWTOs in it. IIRC it was quite bad but then these were pre-1.0 kernel days so things were very, very different then.

What is the problem with corporate help? by INowRegretThesePosts · 2012-08-16 11:42 · Score: 1

It's one of the very few distros that are based solely on donations and have no private corporation behind them.

I see no problem with some corporation being associated with the project. If there are reasonable rules, and if the project has a reasonably open governance, corporate help is welcome.

Re:What is the problem with corporate help? by Sipper · 2012-08-16 12:14 · Score: 4, Interesting

It's one of the very few distros that are based solely on donations and have no private corporation behind them.
I see no problem with some corporation being associated with the project. If there are reasonable rules, and if the project has a reasonably open governance, corporate help is welcome.
To an extent it's fine, but the corporation usually ends up steering the project to some extent. For instance is Ubuntu more community-driven or Cononical driven? Is Fedora community-driven, or is it a platform for developing RHEL? What about Oracle? For instance when I think of Ubuntu, I ask the question "Who made the choice of the 3D Unity interface? Was it the community or was it Cononical?"
Corporations often have different needs than a home user does. Debian, for instance, contains a bunch of niche packages like those used by Amateur Radio operators. These are things you're not likely to see in an "Enterprise" distribution. So what you get as a user does differ depending on who is directing the distribution development. This doesn't make choosing an "Enterprise" distribution wrong of course -- it might be what you need.
Re:What is the problem with corporate help? by PopeRatzo · 2012-08-16 12:57 · Score: 1

If there are reasonable rules, and if the project has a reasonably open governance, corporate help is welcome.
Distributions are people, my friend.

--
You are welcome on my lawn.
Re:What is the problem with corporate help? by petermgreen · 2012-08-16 14:50 · Score: 1

corporate help is fine, i'm sure plenty of corps have helped debian over the years.
corporate dominance OTOH worries me. I'd rather have the descisions about the distro I use argued over by a community than made to fit one corporations needs or wishes possiblly at the expensive of everyone else. Afaict fedora and ubuntu both have some community involvement in the descision making processes but one coroporation (canonical for ubuntu, redhat for fedora) has the ultimate power.

--
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register

debian is good but can't access the internet by Blaskowicz · 2012-08-16 11:58 · Score: 1

not meaning this to be inflammatory but I once installed debian on a computer to give it away, I put a good looking lxde desktop and quite some software (gimp, inkscape, audacity etc.). it was fast and good (a pentium 3 tower with 512MB ram).

only, the guy who took it just couldn't use his usb wifi adapter to pick up a network. I had installed wicd and a generic firmware collection (a package found with apt-cache search, but with little description of what these firmware were). sadly I didn't have the wifi installer during installation. the fact is, with firmware policy the user is fucked when linux guru and concerned hardware aren't in the same place.

so, I'm stuck with ubuntu or mint if installing a computer that I don't manage. ubuntu has the same text mode installer, which allows a similar bare installation with no desktop and then apt-getting the desktop and software is the same (all package names identical). debian has in-place upgrade and the conservative choice of software in stable is not too bad. it would be perfect if we had "apt-get install notcrippledbecauseoffirmware"!

Re:debian is good but can't access the internet by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-16 17:56 · Score: 0

Not meaning this to be inflammatory, but why didn't you do your research before installing a distro that obviously does not cater specifically to newbies? Debians firmware policy has been widely discussed and documented, and it's even mentioned when you enter their site, and they explain how to add the non-free firmware. I can't blame anyone but you for that.
Re:debian is good but can't access the internet by unixisc · 2012-08-16 19:41 · Score: 1

At the time he's talking about, all distros seemed to have that problem. I tried many CDs that I could get my hands on - Corel Linux, Storm Linux, TurboLinux, Caldera, and a couple of others that I forget. Installation for all of them was a breeze, but unfortunately, none of them would recognize my Ethernet NIC. This was way before Ubuntu though, and todays distros typically don't have a problem recognizing one's Realtek cards, but that's not how it was back then. And today, the problem is more of one's Wi-Fi not being recognized. It's not an issue of the liberated vs unliberated firmware, which incidentally is just another spanner in the works.
I have no idea whether this is as big a problem on the BSDs - particularly PC-BSD. But I agree w/ the GP - hopefully, Debian can smoothen out the rough edges for everyone not only in its Linux, but also in its kFreeBSD and HURD versions.
Re:debian is good but can't access the internet by Blaskowicz · 2012-08-17 01:12 · Score: 1

because I was the one installing it, doing all the choice of packages and all desktop environment configuration (autologin, taskbar, wallpaper) and the whole set up was identical to doing it with ubuntu 10.04. squeeze's firmware policy is the biggest difference. I know newbies installing debian the easy way too, it's identical to ubuntu for the most part. a buddy still has an installation of etch or lenny. my main fault was installing some stupid firmware collection and believing it has a 50% chance of working.

In other news by jjohn · 2012-08-16 12:01 · Score: 1

1993 is currently 19 years ago.

Goodnight from Old Guy News Tonight!

Thank you Ian by Trogre · 2012-08-16 12:33 · Score: 1

Ian, thank you for starting such an excellent distribution.

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

19 years! by viperidaenz · 2012-08-16 12:57 · Score: 1

Surely this is the year of the linux desktop?

Happy to Share by PsyciatricHelp · 2012-08-16 13:13 · Score: 2

Happy to Share my birthday with my favorite distro. lenny on my dockstar. Mint on several other machines.

Re:Not the first,but the first to get packaging ri by starfishsystems · 2012-08-16 13:56 · Score: 1

Hmm. I find the packaging system in Debian to be frustratingly parochial. It works fine as long as you allow packages to be installed in default locations. It tends to fail badly at package relocation, something that Sun, SGI, and others got right long ago, and which RPM generally does very well also.

The problem isn't that Debian is basically a PC operating system that you can hack on. That's a worthy thing to be. The problem is people who try to use Debian in the enterprise, or for research or software development or embedded systems where software has to be installed in a multiplicity of ways. And those are exactly the areas that I work in.

I'm becoming convinced that the Debian packaging system was written by squirrels. The inconsistency of configuration and the splendid variety of side effects reminds me of buried nuts. How else do you explain that there are half a dozen packaging frameworks that all try to make the native packager more usable?

--
Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.

Debian by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-16 14:57 · Score: 0

Debian (NASDAQ: DEB; formerly Debian Computer) is an American multinational corporation that designs and sells consumer electronics, computer software, and personal computers. The company's best-known hardware products are the Debian line of computers, the .debPod, the .debPhone and the .debPad. Its software includes the Debian operating system; the Amarok media browser; the Calligra suite of multimedia and creativity software; the LibreOffce suite of productivity software; GIMP, a professional photography package; Kdenlive, a suite of professional audio and film-industry software products; Ardour, a suite of music production tools; the Iceweasel web browser; and .debOS, a mobile operating system. Debian is the world's third-largest mobile phone maker after Samsung and Nokia.

As of July 2011, Debian has 364 retail stores in thirteen countries, and an online store. It is the largest publicly traded company in the world by market capitalization. The company is the largest technology company in the world by revenue and profit, more than Google and Microsoft combined. As of September 24, 2011, the company had 60,400 permanent full-time employees and 2,900 temporary full-time employees worldwide; its worldwide annual revenue in 2010 totalled $65 billion, growing to $108 billion in 2011.

Fortune magazine named Debian the most admired company in the United States in 2008, and in the world from 2008 to 2012. However, the company has received widespread criticism for its contractors' labor, and for its environmental and business practices.

Established on April 1, 1976 in Cupertino, California, and incorporated January 3, 1977, the company was named Debian Computer, for its first 30 years. The word "Computer" was removed from its name on January 9, 2007, as its traditional focus on personal computers shifted towards consumer electronics.

We are protected by the fear of forks by INowRegretThesePosts · 2012-08-16 15:39 · Score: 2

I see no problem with some corporation being associated with the project. If there are reasonable rules, and if the project has a reasonably open governance, corporate help is welcome.
To an extent it's fine, but the corporation usually ends up steering the project to some extent. For instance is Ubuntu more community-driven or Cononical driven?

Since it is open source, we can always fork it. And normally the fear of forks will stop the corporation from acting too badly - doing evil to open source software does not pay.

In the case of Canonical, we have an additional assurance: it is a private company, which does not have a fiduciary duty to maximize profits. It was founded by Mark Shuttleworth, who is a nice guy and was a Debian Developer.

In the case of Ubuntu, the "evil" was selecting Unity as default. However, Xfce, LXDE, KDE and others are still available, and they are working on GNOBuntu (with the full Gnome, including the Gnome Shell). Despite the hate you see on Slashdot, Ubuntu is still the number 1 distribution - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_(operating_system)#Installed_base.

And, personally, I use Unity and like it just fine.

Re:We are protected by the fear of forks by Sipper · 2012-08-16 17:20 · Score: 1

I see no problem with some corporation being associated with the project. If there are reasonable rules, and if the project has a reasonably open governance, corporate help is welcome.
To an extent it's fine, but the corporation usually ends up steering the project to some extent. For instance is Ubuntu more community-driven or Cononical driven?
Since it is open source, we can always fork it. And normally the fear of forks will stop the corporation from acting too badly - doing evil to open source software does not pay.
In the case of Canonical, we have an additional assurance: it is a private company, which does not have a fiduciary duty to maximize profits. It was founded by Mark Shuttleworth, who is a nice guy and was a Debian Developer.
Yes, I met him in person during DebConf10. Very friendly guy; I saw his talk on the Unity interface. I think the Debian developers have sort of an interesting like(--)standoffish relationship with Mark Shuttleworth. My impression was that he's well respected in the Debian community at the same time that many wish his efforts were in Debian rather than Ubuntu. [Nobody actually voiced this though.]

In the case of Ubuntu, the "evil" was selecting Unity as default. However, Xfce, LXDE, KDE and others are still available, and they are working on GNOBuntu (with the full Gnome, including the Gnome Shell). Despite the hate you see on Slashdot, Ubuntu is still the number 1 distribution - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_(operating_system)#Installed_base.
And, personally, I use Unity and like it just fine.
Well, Canonical also pulled the funding of Kubuntu back in February.
http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/02/07/0143224/canonical-pulls-kubuntu-personnel-funding
On http://distrowatch.com/ Ubuntu is #2 behind Linux Mint. Mint has two versions, one based on Ubuntu and one based on Debian -- and I believe it's the one based on Ubuntu that is most popular, which comes with either MATE, Cinnamon (Gnome2-like interface), KDE, or Xfde. Since Mint 13 is most popular, it's clear that many others don't like the Unity interface. :-P [So in effect I agree with you, just in a slightly different way.]
Re:We are protected by the fear of forks by unixisc · 2012-08-16 18:28 · Score: 1

I believe that the one that is based on Debian is aimed more @ servers, than @ desktops. Instead of deriving their server version from Ubuntu, Mint went straight w/ Debian
Re:We are protected by the fear of forks by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-16 19:02 · Score: 0

Mark is basically MIA from Debian, personally I'm surprised they haven't chucked him out of the project yet.
Re:We are protected by the fear of forks by Sipper · 2012-08-16 19:16 · Score: 2

I believe that the one that is based on Debian is aimed more @ servers, than @ desktops. Instead of deriving their server version from Ubuntu, Mint went straight w/ Debian
Actually no, both versions of Mint are specifically focused on desktop use. The idea behind Mint Debian is that you can use the actual Debian Testing repositories so that all of that software is then avialable to Mint. [They also state that the Debian-based edition is faster and more responsive than the Ubuntu-based edition.]
I'm sort of tied to Debian Sid/Unstable right now because that's the target for new source package uploads, and I'm getting into Debian development. Also most Debian-based distributions (including Ubuntu) would rather have packages go through Debian first, so if that was my target then I'd still need Debian Sid. ;-)
Re:We are protected by the fear of forks by Sipper · 2012-08-16 19:34 · Score: 1

Mark is basically MIA from Debian, personally I'm surprised they haven't chucked him out of the project yet.
My understanding is that they don't really do that, unless the developer makes an announcement that they're leaving the project.
Re:We are protected by the fear of forks by Simon+Brooke · 2012-08-16 23:13 · Score: 1

I switched to Mint on my laptop last year, tried it for three months, switched back to Ubuntu. Mint just had too many annoyances - a triumph of branding over content (changing the KDE start menu icon seemed to me just insulting). I still run Debian on my servers and have no intention of changing. It's rock solid, which is what a server needs to be.

--
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
Re:We are protected by the fear of forks by Sipper · 2012-08-17 07:57 · Score: 1

I switched to Mint on my laptop last year, tried it for three months, switched back to Ubuntu. Mint just had too many annoyances - a triumph of branding over content (changing the KDE start menu icon seemed to me just insulting). I still run Debian on my servers and have no intention of changing. It's rock solid, which is what a server needs to be.
Hmm okay thanks for letting me know what your experience with Mint was. I've only deployed Mint Debian to one user so far -- it was a laptop with only 256MB of RAM and a low-end videocard, so I deployed it with Xfce. The only issue the user complained about was a sticking Enter key on the keyboard. The user remained happy with that until she upgraded to a different laptop, which came with Windows 7. [And naturally the new laptop didn't come with OS reinstallation disks.]
The icon on the K menu in KDE is relatively easy to change; right-click, go to Application Launcher Menu Settings, choose Options, click on the Icon to choose a different icon. I occasionally try a different KDE icon, but like you I generally like the default.
I know what you mean about these annoyances, though -- Debian generally keeps the default appearances "barebones" so there's generally not a lot of branding past the Splash screens for Grub2 and the desktop manager, and I likewise like that -- so I know where you're coming from.

Stay away from the website though by guruevi · 2012-08-16 15:42 · Score: 1

Even though I appreciate the effort that Debian has put forth and I'm a large Debian fan, for some reason their marketing machine (or their ads) requested the location of my device which I refuse for any random website.

--
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com

Re:Stay away from the website though by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-16 19:36 · Score: 0

I just checked with a plugin-free browser to make sure I don't block anything, and their site does not ask for my location and I don't see any ads on their website. Did you visit www.debian.org or something else? Did you check your pc for malware?
Re:Stay away from the website though by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-16 22:42 · Score: 0

You just can check the code: http://thanks.debian.net/about
I would save you 5 min: giving your location is totally optional and it is used to place people in the map.
Re:Stay away from the website though by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-17 01:36 · Score: 0

A+ for being uninformed/dumb and non-observant. There's an Openlayers map on the page to see where people are posting their thanks from.

Considering Switching by jon3k · 2012-08-16 15:43 · Score: 1

I'm seriously considering switching from Fedora to Debian because after all these years yum is still so absolutely embarassingly slow. Yes, I've installed presto and fastest-mirror, I've even manually specified mirrors. Short of building your own local repo and rsync'ing it regularly, you will never get a good yum experience, whereas apt is screaming fast right out of the box. And with Fedora continuing to stuff things like systemd and NetworkManager down my throat, I'm at my wits end.

Someone talk me down or push me off the ledge I'm ok either way.

Re:Considering Switching by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-16 17:29 · Score: 0

Jump! My instinct is to push you instead to Slackware, but given your stipulations on what you're looking for, that seems like a fool's errand. So naturally, Debian it is!
Re:Considering Switching by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-17 01:27 · Score: 0

Well, you know what they say:
Once you go slack, you never go back.
Re:Considering Switching by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-17 03:19 · Score: 0

All I can say is I've NEVER experienced a speed issue with debian. Updating repos is fast, downloads are fast, installs are fast.
APT is some of the best software I've ever encountered.

Cononical? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-16 16:08 · Score: 0

Are you being humours with the "con" (ironical? ;-)) or can't you spell canonical? Do you know what the word means? If not, it's particularly ironic given the content of your post.

"Canonical is the adjective for canon, literally a 'rule', and has come to mean also 'standard', 'typical', or 'unique distinguished exemplar'." - Wikipedia

Re:Cononical? by Sipper · 2012-08-16 17:22 · Score: 1

Are you being humours with the "con" (ironical? ;-)) or can't you spell canonical?
:-P Apparently it's that I can't spell Canonical.

Do you know what the word means? If not, it's particularly ironic given the content of your post.
"Canonical is the adjective for canon, literally a 'rule', and has come to mean also 'standard', 'typical', or 'unique distinguished exemplar'." - Wikipedia
Haha! Nice -- thanks for pointing out that irony. Sort of fitting. :-P

Many happy returns, Debian! by unixisc · 2012-08-16 16:16 · Score: 1

Many happy returns, Debian!

The great thing about them is their willingness to port to all architectures - they are the sole surviving distro still supporting Itanium. The other great thing about them is that unlike the FSF, they are not fanatics - on one hand, they have a kFreeBSD project on, and on the other, a HURD project.

I do hope they get to a point soon where they offer their users a choice of Linux/kFreeBSD/Hurd, and in the long term, that they can mix and match GCC OR LLVM/Clang w/ any of these platforms. On HURD, they should consider forking Minux 3.0 and using that (instead of GNU Mach 3.0) as the preferred microkernel. My other wish list item from them is getting Wayland working w/ all 3 of these. And also, like KDE, having a project that starts all sorts of apps that they maintain.

Oh, and also optionally incorporate some of the Ubuntu improvements back into the Debian mainline, so that people can't say that Ubuntu is a lot more usable than Debian.

Re:Many happy returns, Debian! by aztracker1 · 2012-08-16 18:57 · Score: 1

I've been using Mint's LMDE to install lately... I've got a coworker with a G5 who's thinking on going to Linux, Debian PPC is about his only option.

--
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info

Re:Not the first,but the first to get packaging ri by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-16 17:51 · Score: 0

Would you care to elaborate? Have you filed a bug report?

Re:Not the first,but the first to get packaging ri by mvdwege · 2012-08-16 18:23 · Score: 2

What are you talking about? Half a dozen packaging frameworks?

Here's how it works: there is the low-level package manger dpkg, which handles the installation of a package. Automatic dependency resolution is provided by libapt-pkg. That's it. That's the packaging system and framework.

Perhaps what confused you was the number of front-end tools built against libapt-pkg. Those are not frameworks; those are applications, and merely give you a choice of your favourite front-end.

Mart

--
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?

Re:Not the first,but the first to get packaging ri by Lord+Maud'Dib · 2012-08-16 19:19 · Score: 1

Yay, same here! I was thinking back to it (fondly?) just the other day, in fact. Remembering getting X up and running, awwwwwwwww..... the memories! Debian has been my work horse since, except for a bit of Red Hat (5.0 -> 5.2 I think). Gotta love the swirl, Debian that is!

Re:Not the first,but the first to get packaging ri by starfishsystems · 2012-08-16 19:27 · Score: 1

Well, let's see. There's dpkg-buildpackage. There's debuild. There's the debhelper suite. There's pbuilder. A couple of weeks ago, I ran across a fairly sophisticated Debian packager based on autoconf, but it was a huge hassle to set up.

These things all have partially-overlapping capabilities. They all pass configurations around in strange and inconsistent ways. Some use command args. Some use environment variables. Some check for the presence of certain files that may, or not, exist as a side effect of something else. Some rely on makefiles. Some invoke each other. Some only partially invoke each other but bypass certain steps.

--
Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.

no it wasn't by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-16 19:28 · Score: 0

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softlanding_Linux_System

Re:no it wasn't by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-16 20:30 · Score: 0

It wasn't what? Debian was preceded by MCC, TAMU, SLS, Yggdrasil, Slackware and maybe others, but it was definitely one of the first.
Source: http://futurist.se/gldt/

Re:Not the first,but the first to get packaging ri by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-16 20:07 · Score: 0

Amen to that!
Debian is simply the best, end of story. I have tried them all, from Arch right through to Xandros. Using removable hard drives installed in caddies, I had at one stage more than 30 Linux's sitting on my shelf. Tried them all - could pick Linux X to do job A or Linux Y to do job B; knew them all off by heart.

Debian was the only one that did every thing I wanted, and needed.

Thank you, Debian. Really appreciate it.

Re:Not the first,but the first to get packaging ri by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-16 21:43 · Score: 0

SLS afaik also is. Slackware is a SLS fork iirc.

Re:Not the first,but the first to get packaging ri by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-16 22:18 · Score: 0

Oh and for coding C, there is visual studio, eclipse, emacs, vim, ... Must be really crappy since there is so much choice.

dpkg-buildpackage/debhelper/etc are just different ways to create a deb-file. You can do it by hand if you want to (not hard).

The Universal Operating System by xororand · 2012-08-16 23:00 · Score: 4, Informative

It can be used on servers, desktops and small systems like the Raspberry Pi.
It can be bleeding edge with its unstable and experimental repositories.
It can be rock solid with the stable repository.
It comes with a non-free repository just in case you need proprietary firmware or drivers.
But wait, Debian is also a good choice if you're like RMS and want to fully embrace freedom:
It doesn't install anything non-free unless you explicitely allow it (since version 6.0).

Debian is one of the most versatile operating systems.

Re:The Universal Operating System by denvergeek · 2012-08-17 03:08 · Score: 1

What if I hate that filthy hippie RMS?
Re:The Universal Operating System by spike+hay · 2012-08-17 10:12 · Score: 1

It's ok, RMS actually hates Debian.

--
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.

Re:Not the first,but the first to get packaging ri by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-17 00:02 · Score: 0

debhelper is a bunch of of helpercommands (like dh_installman, dh_installcron, ....) called from debian/rules (the package make file) that basically just make it easier to define a package without having to now the latest version of the debian policy by heart
-> you use it pre-dpkg-buildpackage

dpkg-buildpackage builds the package after you've defined (with or withoug using helpers like debhelper)

debuild first runs dpkg-buildpackage, then runs lintian, on the .changes file created (assuming that lintian is installed), and finally signs the .changes and/or .dsc files as appropriate

pbuilder creates a standard changeroot with the lasest stable/testing/unstable then calls dpkg-buildpackage in there

none of the tools you mentioned do the same thing, and where they 'duplicate' functionality they are literally calling dpk-buildpackage under the hood and then doing some extra stuff

Arch, slack, and gentoo by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-17 00:07 · Score: 0

the only thing I think is missing is a simple graphical installer

Arch is supposed to be like slackware (vanilla packages, KISS principle) but with rolling updates. The installation just isn't that big of a deal, because the target user already has a plan and knows how to get there. A graphical installer would be a solution looking for a problem. Like slackware and gentoo, arch is intended for people who prefer to be "on their own".

Imagine how ridiculous it would be to complete a fancy, inspiring, totally graphical installation only to be dumped at the command prompt on your first boot. D'oh!

As for gentoo, of course it has "insane long compiles" -- that is the main design feature. It is supposed to be a meta-distribution where you essentially create your own custom distro yourself. This is a totally different paradigm from any other distro.

In conclusion, arch, slack, and gentoo are not typical consumer-oriented distros. Sure you can turn any one of them into a slick desktop, but they make no assumption about that. They just give you the tools, and you build the house yourself. If you like the idea of a clean, simple distro without the "bullshit", I would suggest debian.

Re:Arch, slack, and gentoo by Sipper · 2012-08-17 08:33 · Score: 1

the only thing I think is missing is a simple graphical installer
Arch is supposed to be like slackware (vanilla packages, KISS principle) but with rolling updates. The installation just isn't that big of a deal, because the target user already has a plan and knows how to get there. A graphical installer would be a solution looking for a problem. Like slackware and gentoo, arch is intended for people who prefer to be "on their own".
Imagine how ridiculous it would be to complete a fancy, inspiring, totally graphical installation only to be dumped at the command prompt on your first boot. D'oh!
Generally the distributions with graphical installers also set up X and your choice of desktop environment, and this was what I had in mind when I made the comment. [Gentoo is a notable exception here: the Gentoo LiveCD has a graphical installer, which after using leaves you with a text-console-only installation. :-P] In terms of Slackware, today I'd likely choose Vector Linux (which is based on Slackware) rather than Slackware, for the graphical installer and more importantly due to the package manager that includes an online repository, which Slackware lacks by default. It was Slackware's lack of abillity to keep the distribution up-to-date via package managment that forced me to give it up sometime between 1999 and 2000, whereby I went to Debian. [And other than Debian's internal politics, I've been happy since. ;-)]
A graphical installer (and setting up Xorg and a desktop envioronment) makes a distribution more accessible -- it greatly reduces the time it takes to get a distribution up and running. It seems Arch had some kind of automated installer at one time, but that seems to have been abandoned since. I don't think a lack of a graphical installer is as much of a design choice rather than something avoided due to the situations the graphical installer might not be able to handle at first.

As for gentoo, of course it has "insane long compiles" -- that is the main design feature. It is supposed to be a meta-distribution where you essentially create your own custom distro yourself. This is a totally different paradigm from any other distro.
I agree.

In conclusion, arch, slack, and gentoo are not typical consumer-oriented distros. Sure you can turn any one of them into a slick desktop, but they make no assumption about that. They just give you the tools, and you build the house yourself. If you like the idea of a clean, simple distro without the "bullshit", I would suggest debian.
Heh. Yes, although you're preeching to the choir -- I've been running Debian for both desktop and servers for 13 years. ;-) This is one one of the reasons I did the "free software survey", because it's been too long since I've run anything but Debian.

Re:Not the first,but the first to get packaging ri by mvdwege · 2012-08-17 01:53 · Score: 1

Ah, you meant frameworks for creating packages.

Unclear communication does not help your point.

--
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?

Re:Not the first,but the first to get packaging ri by starfishsystems · 2012-08-17 03:27 · Score: 2

Condescension doesn't help yours.

Strange as it may seem to you, we're not all idiot consumers here on Slashdot. A reasonable operating assumption, and a courteous one, is that in our postings about software systems we're not offering a narrow viewpoint about one narrow aspect of the system but looking at it as a whole, from the perspective of a producer. That your own viewpoint may not reach to this level is no reason to project the same onto others.

Just try to be nice. Looking at your other postings, I gather that you're not very good at that, but there's no reason that you can't be. It just takes practice.

--
Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.

Happy Birthday! by mrflash818 · 2012-08-17 05:46 · Score: 1

Happy Birthday!

--
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.

What is the problem with Canonical by INowRegretThesePosts · 2012-08-17 06:15 · Score: 1

There aren't any advantages over xubuntu other than not dealing with cannonocial, and I just wanted to give it a try. Had an HDD failure awhile back, (primary ./ volume) so I had to reinstall anyway. Just wanted to explore the landscape more.

What is the problem with Canonical?
Slashdotters did not like Unity, but Ubuntu still has XFCE, LXDE, KDE and other options. They are now working on GNOBuntu, a full Gnome (with the Gnome Shell and everything) flavor of Gnome.

And I like Unity just fine. Ubuntu is still the number 1 distribution*, which suggests that the Ubuntu-hatred is a Slashdot thing.

* See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_(operating_system)#Installed_base

Nostalgia... by vimsy · 2012-08-17 09:04 · Score: 2

Wow, nineteen years.

It has to have been somewhere closer to fifteen years, giving my kids age, I was sitting at my porch, swearing and wishing this "Linux-thing" all the... actually everything I could come up with. Why couldn't it be as "intuitive" as 98SE? Man, was I clueless. But it sure was an uphill struggle. There was a time when I actually considered "installing Debian" as my hobby. Seriously, about two or three times a week, for months, just to get the basics absolutely right. Sigh...

I had a p133 laptop and used the floppy-install. Over and over. Nuff said. The thing is, it worked... eventually.

I still have the old laptop around somewhere, not powered up for years though, but I reckon it could... never mind it could work as reliable and safe as a Win-box, that's not relevant... just knowing it could boot up and give me access to those files from the last century is enough.

The reason I started writing this was, I saw the article while I was about to update my system and a lot of stuff popped up. From all those updates that just generally broke stuff to my special dread... the NVIDIA-updates. It is possible that it was just a couple of months in the late nineties, or possibly a little later, but it still sends shivers down my spine. Having installed Debian on the desktop computer, yeah, my wife and kids only way of getting on line, with all my speeches about how much better, secure and all around... right... Linux and GNU was, Just out of Windows, it was really though being sent out to a shell with no GUI whatsoever. None. I really appreciated the guy in Scotland trying to make the driver work, although, had anyone asked me when another update just had screwed up "everything", I would probably not expressed it that way in the moment, though. :-) Now, some ten-, fifteen years later, even a kernel update is just... nothing major. Just click and confirm, without the nagging feeling that something might break.

I'm using a derivative, Lubuntu, on my netbook right now, but as always, since before the millennium, keeping Debian on my server .

Thanks for a throughly solid distro.

I really mean it.

Thanks.

(Second language, spell check by Abi-word.)

Not Quite Correct by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-17 10:03 · Score: 0

Debian may have been announced in August 1993, but it was only publicly released in February 1994, if I recall correctly

Re:Not the first,but the first to get packaging ri by cerberusss · 2012-08-17 10:24 · Score: 1

Then practice what you preach, and graciously admit you weren't clear.

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Re:Not the first,but the first to get packaging ri by mvdwege · 2012-08-17 19:40 · Score: 1

Why should I be nice to someone who starts out as a condescending prick?

I've given you enough credit as it is. I do have little time for idiots, but as you may notice, both my previous posts in this thread were anything but antagonistic. One was based on a misunderstanding, one was a simple statement of perceived fact.

So stop whining and be a sodding adult, will you?

Mart

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"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?

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