Debian is a distro made by developers for developers. Debian isn't a corporate entity trying to make money and hence needing to attract more newbies so if something is not interesting to a developer it just doesn't get done. The fact that some total newbies were able to install it was just luck until some people finally decided to rewrite the installer to make it easier to maintain and more newbie friendly. If you think debian-installer isn't good enough you can always fix the issues yourself and submit patches or get cvs access. More people helping on debian-installer is always welcome. However, even installing via boot-floppies was easy for anyone who actually knew how to install DOS/Windows, I didn't need any help the first time I installed it 6 years ago. That isn't to say the installer was good just that it wasn't hard to use by people who had installed OSes before. Also, because you only have to install Debian once on a machine since upgrades have always been seamless, many of the minor issues in the old installer were easily ignored. The biggest issue IMHO with boot-floppies was that new installer images were not created after a release so it was not easy to install onto machines newer than the Debian release if they needed kernel updates.
No one claimed it was graphical, I doubt Debian will ever have an official graphical installer precisely because of the fact that many of the archs it supports probably would not work with a graphical installer. Also it would likely take substantially more space on the install media and memory to be able to use it. Also, Debian already has an unofficial graphical installer from Progeny for the few people who need that sort of thing.
Not sure which command line installer you are talking about, the only one I know of at all is gentoo. Debian's installer isn't a command line installer, its a tui and yes there is a very big difference between a command line interface and a text user interface.
The look ncurses-style tui wasn't intended to be changed. All the actual code, questions, autodetection, etc are new though. Also, the installer is now modular which should help keep Debian from having to take years to fix the installer between releases like was the case with the previous installer.
You most likely used the Network Install from Debian 3.0 (boot-floppies) which is 2 years old. The current installer is available from http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/ for testing and fixes most of the problems you mentioned with respect to autodetection, etc. It has worked well for me for the past year.
The Sci-Fi channel is already worthless with the current crew managing it. If it disappeared entirely I doubt many would miss it. Any time a show on Sci-Fi gets a lot of viewers its cancelled.
Re:Debian has it already
on
KDE 3.2.1 Released
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Yes, I was waiting to upload KDE until 3.2.1 came out. The reason KDE 3.2.0 was never uploaded to sid was that it was far too buggy in important areas such as kmail eating email. Even with KDE 3.2.1 several major bugs have already been found since its release to packagers last week. But users who always complain that KDE in Debian is outdated will have their shiny full of bugs release.
Re:Debian avoiding the new release??
on
XFree86 4.4 Released
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
Yes, XFree86.org was the ineffiency and has finally been removed from the picture.
Re:Debian avoiding the new release??
on
XFree86 4.4 Released
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Debian will probably switch to freedesktop.org packages much quicker than previous XFree86 packages due to upstream finally maintaining them properly. XFree86 was monolithic, freedesktop.org is not. XFree86 never cared about non-x86 architectures, it appears freedestkop.org will. XFree86 was a closed development model, freedesktop.org isn't...
Re:Debian avoiding the new release??
on
XFree86 4.4 Released
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I'm not going to upload KDE 3.2 to sid until KDE 3.2.1 is released. The KDE 3.2 release had so little testing done to it that they immediately released required interim fixes to kmail for it among other things like kwifi not even being compilable. There are already 10MB+ of diffs from KDE 3.2 -> KDE 3.2 BRANCH (3.2.1), 3.2 BRANCH is supposed to be just bug fixes so that should tell you 3.2 should be avoided.;) You can always use the experimental (READ BUGGY UPSTREAM SOURCE) debs as mentioned on http://wiki.debian.net/DebianKDE.
They will be moving to the alternatives once they are actually ready. For example, the freedesktop.org xserver hasn't had an official release yet, and isn't ready for general use. From what one of the Debian X Maintainers told me Debian will be moving completely over to freedesktop.org packages once they are ready for use.
freedesktop.org already has replacements for pretty much everything in xfree86. The new license change has just sped up the need for it to work now. They recently released their new xlibs, and Keith Packard is still working on a replacement xserver. The only major problem left is that since the new xserver is a redesign it will need new binary drivers from ati/nvidia.
The reason most of the other replacement archs haven't fared well is that they aren't supported by Windows. However ia64 is supported by Windows. The main problem with ia64 chips is that they still cost well over $1000 USD. The last time I checked the chips were close to $4000 per chip. If Intel released an ia64 chip for the price of a current P4 (not P4EE), and reduced its power consumption a bit, then it would have a much better chance of taking off. Yes, compatibility would still be an issue but could be solved in Windows via something like WOW64 emulation.
Well since my only experience with Sun's was several years ago with Solaris 2.6/7 on Sun Ultra 10's and Netra's I suppose it could be skewed. The systems were about the speed of a Celeron 400 so that probably annoyed me a bit as well. It has been a while since I used them (previous job) but from what I can recall it didn't even come with simple utilities like "top" out of the box. So I had to go download and manually install a bunch of shit off the sunfreeware site. Couldn't even compile things since even gcc wasn't included. I have heard rumors that with Solaris 9 useful utilities are finally included. The only things we used it for were CiscoWorks, OpenView, and Concord eHealth. And no I did not get someone else to do it. I have been using various forms of Unix (AIX/FreeBSD/Linux/Solaris) since 1993. Since Sun's are so overpriced for the computing power they deliver we used Debian Linux x86 boxes for everything else.
BTW - I notice you post as Anonymous while I post under my real user account (notice the id #). Are you scared you might get modded as a troll?:)
I have adminstered Sun equipment before (around 6 servers) and it was not fun. They don't come with any useful software by default. IMHO Suns suck, the only thing they are good for is highly specialized proprietary software. Thats also the only thing we used them for. There are much better and cheaper ways to do just about anything else.
So I get marked as a troll for stating the fact that Apple products are overpriced. Or alternatively... you are paying a premium for Apple design, whichever makes you feel better. I happen to have an iPod myself but I don't delude myself into thinking Apple isn't overpriced.
I suppose I should back that up my statements wrt price.
(All Prices USD)
Apple iPod 40GB $500 Apple iPod 20GB $400 Apple iPod 15GB $300
Creative Zen Xtra 60GB $390 Creative Zen Xtra 40GB $300 Creative Zen Xtra 30GB $270
iRiver iHP-140 40GB $XXX - Not for sale yet. iRiver iHP-120 20GB $340 iRiver iHP-10 10GB $300
The Rio RioVolt line of cd players were simply rebadged iRiver iMP cd players. At the stores where I live there are more iRiver units for sale than any other mp3 player, especially Apple iPods. Perhaps that is because the Apple iPods are so overpriced...
Releasing iTunes for the PC is going to actually cause more problems for Apple than just loss of Mac sales due to not needing a Mac. It will cause potential Mac converts to think Apple can't code themselves out of a wet paper bag. iTunes 4.1.1 on Windows XP is extremely unstable constantly crashing the system. Windoze jokes aside Windows XP is normally fairly stable, but the problems with iTunes are both very repeatable and widespread (see the itunes forums). Most of the problems appear to be caused by the GearSecurity Service that iTunes installs, without it however you can't rip or burn CDs. Also trying to sync the iPod when you have other firewire devices tends to make the other firewire devices unstable, whether this is a problem with the iPodService Service or something else I don't know.
Security is more than just patching the systems, have a secure internal network and a good security policy to live by, and the risk of exploits happening inside goes down. If you can't connect to any machine (and thus not log on to it), you won't have the ability to exploit the vulnerability either.
Only as long as you don't need anyone to work remotely. Most OSS projects need people to be able to work remotely...
The developer's password was obtained via a trojaned ssh so even if it was a good password, which it likely was, since their box was compromised it didn't matter. Combine that with a local root exploit that was not properly announced and not even in an officially released kernel until Nov 28 (2.4.23) and you end up with the problem Debian had.
"Dumping/loading 512MB on/off disk to restore memory only takes a couple seconds, whereas an Intel processor has to initialize and set all registers back to their previous state, then reload RAM off disk. Something like that..."
Impossible with current hard drives, unless you had a really nice RAID which normal Win and Mac machines don't have. The fastest IDE drive today does 72MB/s on outer edge (new 2nd gen WDC Raptors) which would mean for 1GB of ram it would definitely take more than 15s just to restore the memory, with standard drives it would probably take closer to 20-30s. So it must be using suspend to ram. Also, dumping to the hard drive is typically considered hibernation.
However, even doing standard STR sleep is fairly impressive at only 2-5s.
One of the more popular ripping programs for windows, Audiograbber, has supported ogg vorbis officially since at least Feb 11, 2003, and it was very simple to use it with vorbis before that, since it has plugin support to encode to anything you want.
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Debian is a distro made by developers for developers. Debian isn't a corporate entity trying to make money and hence needing to attract more newbies so if something is not interesting to a developer it just doesn't get done. The fact that some total newbies were able to install it was just luck until some people finally decided to rewrite the installer to make it easier to maintain and more newbie friendly. If you think debian-installer isn't good enough you can always fix the issues yourself and submit patches or get cvs access. More people helping on debian-installer is always welcome. However, even installing via boot-floppies was easy for anyone who actually knew how to install DOS/Windows, I didn't need any help the first time I installed it 6 years ago. That isn't to say the installer was good just that it wasn't hard to use by people who had installed OSes before. Also, because you only have to install Debian once on a machine since upgrades have always been seamless, many of the minor issues in the old installer were easily ignored. The biggest issue IMHO with boot-floppies was that new installer images were not created after a release so it was not easy to install onto machines newer than the Debian release if they needed kernel updates.
No one claimed it was graphical, I doubt Debian will ever have an official graphical installer precisely because of the fact that many of the archs it supports probably would not work with a graphical installer. Also it would likely take substantially more space on the install media and memory to be able to use it. Also, Debian already has an unofficial graphical installer from Progeny for the few people who need that sort of thing.
Not sure which command line installer you are talking about, the only one I know of at all is gentoo. Debian's installer isn't a command line installer, its a tui and yes there is a very big difference between a command line interface and a text user interface.
The look ncurses-style tui wasn't intended to be changed. All the actual code, questions, autodetection, etc are new though. Also, the installer is now modular which should help keep Debian from having to take years to fix the installer between releases like was the case with the previous installer.
You most likely used the Network Install from Debian 3.0 (boot-floppies) which is 2 years old. The current installer is available from http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/ for testing and fixes most of the problems you mentioned with respect to autodetection, etc. It has worked well for me for the past year.
That still doesn't explain why they (Viacom/etc) force the providers (Dish/DTV) to resell those channels to end users in base packages...
The Sci-Fi channel is already worthless with the current crew managing it. If it disappeared entirely I doubt many would miss it. Any time a show on Sci-Fi gets a lot of viewers its cancelled.
Yes, I was waiting to upload KDE until 3.2.1 came out. The reason KDE 3.2.0 was never uploaded to sid was that it was far too buggy in important areas such as kmail eating email. Even with KDE 3.2.1 several major bugs have already been found since its release to packagers last week. But users who always complain that KDE in Debian is outdated will have their shiny full of bugs release.
Yes, XFree86.org was the ineffiency and has finally been removed from the picture.
Debian will probably switch to freedesktop.org packages much quicker than previous XFree86 packages due to upstream finally maintaining them properly. XFree86 was monolithic, freedesktop.org is not. XFree86 never cared about non-x86 architectures, it appears freedestkop.org will. XFree86 was a closed development model, freedesktop.org isn't...
I'm not going to upload KDE 3.2 to sid until KDE 3.2.1 is released. The KDE 3.2 release had so little testing done to it that they immediately released required interim fixes to kmail for it among other things like kwifi not even being compilable. There are already 10MB+ of diffs from KDE 3.2 -> KDE 3.2 BRANCH (3.2.1), 3.2 BRANCH is supposed to be just bug fixes so that should tell you 3.2 should be avoided. ;) You can always use the experimental (READ BUGGY UPSTREAM SOURCE) debs as mentioned on http://wiki.debian.net/DebianKDE.
They will be moving to the alternatives once they are actually ready. For example, the freedesktop.org xserver hasn't had an official release yet, and isn't ready for general use. From what one of the Debian X Maintainers told me Debian will be moving completely over to freedesktop.org packages once they are ready for use.
freedesktop.org already has replacements for pretty much everything in xfree86. The new license change has just sped up the need for it to work now. They recently released their new xlibs, and Keith Packard is still working on a replacement xserver. The only major problem left is that since the new xserver is a redesign it will need new binary drivers from ati/nvidia.
http://www.freedesktop.org/Software/xserver
It would probably run faster as well since DVD's go up to 16x which is ~ 20MB/s vs CD's 52x at 7.6MB/s.
The reason most of the other replacement archs haven't fared well is that they aren't supported by Windows. However ia64 is supported by Windows. The main problem with ia64 chips is that they still cost well over $1000 USD. The last time I checked the chips were close to $4000 per chip. If Intel released an ia64 chip for the price of a current P4 (not P4EE), and reduced its power consumption a bit, then it would have a much better chance of taking off. Yes, compatibility would still be an issue but could be solved in Windows via something like WOW64 emulation.
You can buy a ATI Radeon 9600 SE fanless for around $90 USD.
Well since my only experience with Sun's was several years ago with Solaris 2.6/7 on Sun Ultra 10's and Netra's I suppose it could be skewed. The systems were about the speed of a Celeron 400 so that probably annoyed me a bit as well. It has been a while since I used them (previous job) but from what I can recall it didn't even come with simple utilities like "top" out of the box. So I had to go download and manually install a bunch of shit off the sunfreeware site. Couldn't even compile things since even gcc wasn't included. I have heard rumors that with Solaris 9 useful utilities are finally included. The only things we used it for were CiscoWorks, OpenView, and Concord eHealth. And no I did not get someone else to do it. I have been using various forms of Unix (AIX/FreeBSD/Linux/Solaris) since 1993. Since Sun's are so overpriced for the computing power they deliver we used Debian Linux x86 boxes for everything else.
:)
BTW - I notice you post as Anonymous while I post under my real user account (notice the id #). Are you scared you might get modded as a troll?
I have adminstered Sun equipment before (around 6 servers) and it was not fun. They don't come with any useful software by default. IMHO Suns suck, the only thing they are good for is highly specialized proprietary software. Thats also the only thing we used them for. There are much better and cheaper ways to do just about anything else.
1024x1024 would be 1MiP, not to be confused with 1 mips (millions of instructions per second).
Yea, those stupid extra i's are annoying.
So I get marked as a troll for stating the fact that Apple products are overpriced. Or alternatively... you are paying a premium for Apple design, whichever makes you feel better. I happen to have an iPod myself but I don't delude myself into thinking Apple isn't overpriced.
I suppose I should back that up my statements wrt price.
(All Prices USD)
Apple iPod 40GB $500
Apple iPod 20GB $400
Apple iPod 15GB $300
Creative Zen Xtra 60GB $390
Creative Zen Xtra 40GB $300
Creative Zen Xtra 30GB $270
iRiver iHP-140 40GB $XXX - Not for sale yet.
iRiver iHP-120 20GB $340
iRiver iHP-10 10GB $300
Philips HDD100 15GB $270
Rio Karma 20GB $290
So you haven't heard of iRiver?
Perhaps you have heard of Rio?
The Rio RioVolt line of cd players were simply rebadged iRiver iMP cd players. At the stores where I live there are more iRiver units for sale than any other mp3 player, especially Apple iPods. Perhaps that is because the Apple iPods are so overpriced...
Releasing iTunes for the PC is going to actually cause more problems for Apple than just loss of Mac sales due to not needing a Mac. It will cause potential Mac converts to think Apple can't code themselves out of a wet paper bag. iTunes 4.1.1 on Windows XP is extremely unstable constantly crashing the system. Windoze jokes aside Windows XP is normally fairly stable, but the problems with iTunes are both very repeatable and widespread (see the itunes forums). Most of the problems appear to be caused by the GearSecurity Service that iTunes installs, without it however you can't rip or burn CDs. Also trying to sync the iPod when you have other firewire devices tends to make the other firewire devices unstable, whether this is a problem with the iPodService Service or something else I don't know.
Only as long as you don't need anyone to work remotely. Most OSS projects need people to be able to work remotely...
The developer's password was obtained via a trojaned ssh so even if it was a good password, which it likely was, since their box was compromised it didn't matter. Combine that with a local root exploit that was not properly announced and not even in an officially released kernel until Nov 28 (2.4.23) and you end up with the problem Debian had.
"Dumping/loading 512MB on/off disk to restore memory only takes a couple seconds, whereas an Intel processor has to initialize and set all registers back to their previous state, then reload RAM off disk. Something like that..."
Impossible with current hard drives, unless you had a really nice RAID which normal Win and Mac machines don't have. The fastest IDE drive today does 72MB/s on outer edge (new 2nd gen WDC Raptors) which would mean for 1GB of ram it would definitely take more than 15s just to restore the memory, with standard drives it would probably take closer to 20-30s. So it must be using suspend to ram. Also, dumping to the hard drive is typically considered hibernation.
However, even doing standard STR sleep is fairly impressive at only 2-5s.
One of the more popular ripping programs for windows, Audiograbber, has supported ogg vorbis officially since at least Feb 11, 2003, and it was very simple to use it with vorbis before that, since it has plugin support to encode to anything you want.