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Happy Birthday, Debian!
An anonymous reader writes with word that as of today, the Debian project — one of the first distros, and still going strong, not to mention parent or grandparent of many other distros — is 19 years old. "Quoting from the official project history: 'The Debian Project was officially founded by Ian Murdock on August 16th, 1993. At that time, the whole concept of a 'distribution' of Linux was new. Ian intended Debian to be a distribution which would be made openly, in the spirit of Linux and GNU.' Send an appreciation message: http://thanks.debian.net/."
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?
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.
but when I do, I prefer Ubuntu.
It actually DOES allow you to do that. Do your install in expert mode and stop being a sissy! :)
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..."
underpowered computer surrogate
Somebody didn't get a degree in Computer Science...
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
There was also Yggrasil Linux, started in 1992, but it is not alive any more.
Yggdrasil. Use the Norse Luke!
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!
Now there's one hoopy frood who really knows where his towel is!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Happy to Share my birthday with my favorite distro. lenny on my dockstar. Mint on several other machines.
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.
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'?
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'?
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.
When viewing this picture, zoomed out, one can easily see that Debian is by far the most successful parent distribution.
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.
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.
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.)