Don't forget, Debian, Ubuntu, and other distros offer Firefox 2.0, and their users don't generally have to go to getfirefox.com to get the browser. So you can add a 1 with a couple of zeroes to the first day users of the new browser...
(of course, magazines provide CDs etc, both with IE7 and FF2.0, so stats are moot anyway)
One thing I did not specify -- as I did not mention Ubuntu in the introduction:
I recommend Ubuntu to new users of Linux because in my experience, most of them were just that: new users who wanted to read their email, author documents, and use their laptops power management at night. Sure, all of this is very possible with Debian, but IME not really for the newbie.
Here, Ubuntu has done a good job at making Debian more accessible. That is all. And being accessible to the Linux newbie just isn't "Debian's place" IMHO. We make a stable operating system that is a reliable tool for those who know how to use it. We don't want bells and whistles and lots of automatic stuff making it easier for the new users.
I would not recommend Ubuntu to someone who has the potential to climb the curve quickly. And of the dozens of people I've switched to Linux/Ubuntu in the past months, most have already switched to Debian. I think that's a natural thing to do as you exceed the offerings of Ubuntu, which is am operating system that trades much flexibility for the tight integration and beautification it has.
Anyway, to each their own. Going for Ubuntu is probably not a mistake. Heading right for Debian isn't either, but you're in for some more work.
> I do find it a little odd that he should recommend that new users try Ubuntu > rather than Debian. One is tempted to ask: what's the problem whereby they > can't use Debian, then?
I try to answer this question in the introduction of my book, section "Target audience". You can obtain the first chapter from http://debiansystem.info/about . Now I hope you guys aren't going to kill my server.
I was born in 1979 and I became a beta-tester with 13. I don't think Microsoft actually ever cared about my age. I was contacted about beta testing because I completed all 6 MCPs required for the MCSE in a single day, or at least so the email said.
I still have the reports I sent to them as part of the beta testing, and mind you, even now they are everything but childish. But they clearly come from someone who was used to administering nets for 50-or-so users with Netware, and Netware wasn't the direction they wanted to take with NT 4.
For instance, I proposed to allow specification of ACLs per user, rather than per resource. Who here has used Netware and didn't come to love this feature?
The 60 pages of ideology you refer to belong to a chapter on the Debian project, its history and organisation. Right in the first paragraph of that chapter, it says:
If you are anxious to get down to the bones of the Debian system, skip this chapter. However, the Debian system and the Debian project are inseparable; this will become more and more obvious as you learn more about the Debian system. If you decide to skip this chapter for now, please make sure you read it some time later. It contains many pieces of important information for the serious Debian administrator.
As a matter of fact, my initial chapter 2 was only about a quarter to a third of the current volume, but many discussions with fellow developers and future readers revealed that an in-depth analysis of the Debian project and its environment would be in order for 3 reasons:
You get drawn into Debian the more effectively you use it. Just with any society, the more you know ahead of time, the easier it will be to integrate.
Debian is perhaps the largest open source projects, and among the most successful in that league. Often people ask themselves why and how all this works -- it's still counterintuitive to a lot. The chapter tries to shed some light.
Nowhere else could I find a complete and thorough account of the Debian project and its organisation, so there was a need.
If you think those 60 pages to be useless, skip them and spend your time reading the other 540 pages of the book.
Now, to address your points about the publisher and freeness:
First, you may want to read more carefully. No Starch is not the publisher of this book. The book was made possible only by Open Source Press, who released the book to the central European market. No Starch really only acted as a distributor for the rest of the world, insisting to put the 608 pages behind their own cover design. You are thus wrong concluding this book first went to O'Reilly's editors before I hung my head and went to exploit the "lower standards" of No Starch, which you allege. The book was conceived together with Open Source Press from the start, and writing it was a pure joy. The book would not exist without OSP's dedication, patience, and high quality standards.
You accuse No Starch of lousy editing, even though they had nothing to do with the editing. As noted in the acknowledgements, I was assisted by an English-speaker to work through grammar and spelling errors in the final script, but we were under a tight timeline (try synchronising a book's release with the release plans of the next Debian stable...). If you didn't figure it out yourself: I am not a native English-speaker, yet I chose to write this book in English to reach a wider audience, and because the Debian project is largely English-spoken (and because German is not a language for computer books). I realise that my command over the English language is far from perfect, and that some grammatical problems slipped the intensive editing we did in the last weeks before the printing, but so far, the feedback has been most encouraging, although sometimes along the lines of "the grammar slipped occasionally, which is nothing more than a slight inconvenience to the reader". I would have certainly appreciated had you taken the time to point out the errors you spotted to me (the address is specified in the introduction).
You are right in stating that the book is anything but free. The reason is because it would not have happened without the publisher, and as you point out, the rent has to come from somewhere. However, we are discussing possibilities of how to bridge the gap between paying that rent and releasing information for free. You may like to know that since its release, we have shipped
I've had the pleasure to meet most of the Debian women at the debconf. And believe it or not: they were there to hack and improve Debian, not to serve as sexual attractors. Strangely, noone at debconf had a problem with that, or even thought otherwise. So why don't you (average slashdot reading horny male geek) go jack off to some porn site and not come back?
The thread covers most of the reasons why working as root is just bad and dangerous. The two most important for me are typos on/bin/rm calls and unaudited software.
So far I didn't know what to think of Robertson. Now I am confident he's an idiot.
I agree that it's good to have a discussion right now, although it's impossible to follow it for sheer volume.
The beef of many people is that rather than soliciting the community for proposals on how to improve the release cycle, a number of influential people got together to draft a plan, threw it out into the open, and let the discussions begin -- but not discussions on how to best solve the problem, but rather on discussions whether to drop architectures or not.
If you want better support for a common architecture, use Ubuntu. Debian does not try to be the best system for the common architecture. Debian tries to unify system administration across all architectures, and do so in a bottom-up fashion. It is designed to be used as a basis by others, who specialise on making things prettier and run better.
As an active Debian developer, I simply want to state: this is anything but final and not at all decided. I am only one of many developers against the proposed scheme, and especially against the way in which the scheme was devised -- in a closed meeting with only a few select members, and completely without soliciting any input from the community.
In the long run, Debian may well have to concentrate more on some architectures than others, but a radical step such as the one proposed will probably not fly well with the community. Since our users are our top priority, you can expect many more emails on the topic before anything will happen.
Note that I am open. I know Debian is elitarian, and I try not to be. What I wrote was simply from experience. But I don't know Gentoo other than from the stuff I heard about it.
So how do you admin 20 systems rmeotely in Gentoo, in a timely fashion pertaining to updates, and without too much time invested?
Running RedHat or anything of that sort may be okay for the single multimedia workstation you keep around for your evening entertainment and the children.
But as soon as you have more than one computer to worry about -- possibly geographically separate -- the colourfulness and one-clickability quickly yields to major management pains.
I personally don't even understand how Gentoo can hold strong. When I think about my personal 17 machines, spaced across five countries in three continents, and the 47 machines I administer at university, then there is only one logical answer. Debian.
If I look at System/Executables/Zsh/Settings or whatever they call it, I am catapulted back into c:\progra~1 world.
Are they considering backups? I don't want to backup the binaries, and I don't want to write endless lists of inclusions or exceptions.
Or are they going to "fall back" to the legacy tree, which was designed to be exactly that: a tree logically divided into groups that make sense to a system.
Branden, without you, Debian would be nowhere, and everyone knows that. We already thank you for everything you have done!
Having to fetch XFree86 4.2.0 out of the new testing after Woody's release (*when* it's ready) is a small price to pay for this impending best Debian release of all times.
Slashdot Mirror
etch is out. Happy Easter.
Don't forget, Debian, Ubuntu, and other distros offer Firefox 2.0, and their users don't generally have to go to getfirefox.com to get the browser. So you can add a 1 with a couple of zeroes to the first day users of the new browser...
(of course, magazines provide CDs etc, both with IE7 and FF2.0, so stats are moot anyway)
http://mjg59.livejournal.com/2006/10/10/
See http://wiki.gag.com/cgi-bin/blosxom/2006/08/15#200 6.08.14
or ask him.
1.5 is in unstable already, which means it'll soon trickle into testing. It also means that the next Ubuntu release in April will have it.
One thing I did not specify -- as I did not mention Ubuntu in the introduction:
I recommend Ubuntu to new users of Linux because in my experience, most of them were just that: new users who wanted to read their email, author documents, and use their laptops power management at night. Sure, all of this is very possible with Debian, but IME not really for the newbie.
Here, Ubuntu has done a good job at making Debian more accessible. That is all. And being accessible to the Linux newbie just isn't "Debian's place" IMHO. We make a stable operating system that is a reliable tool for those who know how to use it. We don't want bells and whistles and lots of automatic stuff making it easier for the new users.
I would not recommend Ubuntu to someone who has the potential to climb the curve quickly. And of the dozens of people I've switched to Linux/Ubuntu in the past months, most have already switched to Debian. I think that's a natural thing to do as you exceed the offerings of Ubuntu, which is am operating system that trades much flexibility for the tight integration and beautification it has.
Anyway, to each their own. Going for Ubuntu is probably not a mistake. Heading right for Debian isn't either, but you're in for some more work.
I would love to hear suggestions as to what's missing. feedback at debianbook.info .
> I do find it a little odd that he should recommend that new users try Ubuntu
> rather than Debian. One is tempted to ask: what's the problem whereby they
> can't use Debian, then?
I try to answer this question in the introduction of my book, section "Target audience". You can obtain the first chapter from http://debiansystem.info/about . Now I hope you guys aren't going to kill my server.
I was born in 1979 and I became a beta-tester with 13. I don't think Microsoft actually ever cared about my age. I was contacted about beta testing because I completed all 6 MCPs required for the MCSE in a single day, or at least so the email said.
I still have the reports I sent to them as part of the beta testing, and mind you, even now they are everything but childish. But they clearly come from someone who was used to administering nets for 50-or-so users with Netware, and Netware wasn't the direction they wanted to take with NT 4.
For instance, I proposed to allow specification of ACLs per user, rather than per resource. Who here has used Netware and didn't come to love this feature?
-- martin
The 60 pages of ideology you refer to belong to a chapter on the Debian project, its history and organisation. Right in the first paragraph of that chapter, it says:
As a matter of fact, my initial chapter 2 was only about a quarter to a third of the current volume, but many discussions with fellow developers and future readers revealed that an in-depth analysis of the Debian project and its environment would be in order for 3 reasons:
If you think those 60 pages to be useless, skip them and spend your time reading the other 540 pages of the book.
Now, to address your points about the publisher and freeness:
First, you may want to read more carefully. No Starch is not the publisher of this book. The book was made possible only by Open Source Press, who released the book to the central European market. No Starch really only acted as a distributor for the rest of the world, insisting to put the 608 pages behind their own cover design. You are thus wrong concluding this book first went to O'Reilly's editors before I hung my head and went to exploit the "lower standards" of No Starch, which you allege. The book was conceived together with Open Source Press from the start, and writing it was a pure joy. The book would not exist without OSP's dedication, patience, and high quality standards.
You accuse No Starch of lousy editing, even though they had nothing to do with the editing. As noted in the acknowledgements, I was assisted by an English-speaker to work through grammar and spelling errors in the final script, but we were under a tight timeline (try synchronising a book's release with the release plans of the next Debian stable...). If you didn't figure it out yourself: I am not a native English-speaker, yet I chose to write this book in English to reach a wider audience, and because the Debian project is largely English-spoken (and because German is not a language for computer books). I realise that my command over the English language is far from perfect, and that some grammatical problems slipped the intensive editing we did in the last weeks before the printing, but so far, the feedback has been most encouraging, although sometimes along the lines of "the grammar slipped occasionally, which is nothing more than a slight inconvenience to the reader". I would have certainly appreciated had you taken the time to point out the errors you spotted to me (the address is specified in the introduction).
You are right in stating that the book is anything but free. The reason is because it would not have happened without the publisher, and as you point out, the rent has to come from somewhere. However, we are discussing possibilities of how to bridge the gap between paying that rent and releasing information for free. You may like to know that since its release, we have shipped
I've had the pleasure to meet most of the Debian women at the debconf. And believe it or not: they were there to hack and improve Debian, not to serve as sexual attractors. Strangely, noone at debconf had a problem with that, or even thought otherwise. So why don't you (average slashdot reading horny male geek) go jack off to some porn site and not come back?
The thread covers most of the reasons why working as root is just bad and dangerous. The two most important for me are typos on /bin/rm calls and unaudited software.
So far I didn't know what to think of Robertson. Now I am confident he's an idiot.
I agree that it's good to have a discussion right now, although it's impossible to follow it for sheer volume.
The beef of many people is that rather than soliciting the community for proposals on how to improve the release cycle, a number of influential people got together to draft a plan, threw it out into the open, and let the discussions begin -- but not discussions on how to best solve the problem, but rather on discussions whether to drop architectures or not.
If you want better support for a common architecture, use Ubuntu. Debian does not try to be the best system for the common architecture. Debian tries to unify system administration across all architectures, and do so in a bottom-up fashion. It is designed to be used as a basis by others, who specialise on making things prettier and run better.
As an active Debian developer, I simply want to state: this is anything but final and not at all decided. I am only one of many developers against the proposed scheme, and especially against the way in which the scheme was devised -- in a closed meeting with only a few select members, and completely without soliciting any input from the community.
In the long run, Debian may well have to concentrate more on some architectures than others, but a radical step such as the one proposed will probably not fly well with the community. Since our users are our top priority, you can expect many more emails on the topic before anything will happen.
I don't have time to read 1700 comments, so if this has been posted already, I am sorry.
Try surfing to the IP that www.georgewbush.com resolves to. Fucking morons.
"Gates: We're big believers in interoperability."
Hahahahaha!
As ugly or bad this player may be, it primarily sucks because it still does not support Ogg.
When can we finally get a player to play royalty-free stuff?
Note that I am open. I know Debian is elitarian, and I try not to be. What I wrote was simply from experience. But I don't know Gentoo other than from the stuff I heard about it.
So how do you admin 20 systems rmeotely in Gentoo, in a timely fashion pertaining to updates, and without too much time invested?
I would have to agree.
Running RedHat or anything of that sort may be okay for the single multimedia workstation you keep around for your evening entertainment and the children.
But as soon as you have more than one computer to worry about -- possibly geographically separate -- the colourfulness and one-clickability quickly yields to major management pains.
I personally don't even understand how Gentoo can hold strong. When I think about my personal 17 machines, spaced across five countries in three continents, and the 47 machines I administer at university, then there is only one logical answer. Debian.
If I look at System/Executables/Zsh/Settings or whatever they call it, I am catapulted back into c:\progra~1 world.
Are they considering backups? I don't want to backup the binaries, and I don't want to write endless lists of inclusions or exceptions.
Or are they going to "fall back" to the legacy tree, which was designed to be exactly that: a tree logically divided into groups that make sense to a system.
I don't get it.
Branden, without you, Debian would be nowhere, and everyone knows that. We already thank you for everything you have done!
Having to fetch XFree86 4.2.0 out of the new testing after Woody's release (*when* it's ready) is a small price to pay for this impending best Debian release of all times.