I don't know if you are upgrading from stable or not, but you need to upgrade using 'apt-get dist-upgrade' and sometimes need to run it more than once. This prevents things from getting screwed up during the installation process.
Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 includes the efforts of the Debian-Edu/Skolelinux,
Debian-Med and Debian-Accessibility sub-projects which boosted the number
of educational packages and those with a medical affiliation as well as
packages designed especially for people with disabilities.
I spent a weekend doing accessability evaluations on computers. The assignment was for Windows, but the teacher let me use Linux since that was all I had. Turns out my Debian-Linux distrobution had far more accessability features available than anything Windows had. If I had a microphone and a few cameras I could really go to town. But it is worth mentioning that the Linux community as a whole and Debian in particular has done a better than industry standard job at this>
All you wankers out there slamming Debian for being slow to release can just push off!
I am glad that Debian is as stable as it is. Linux has certainly reached the point today where software does not have to develop at the speed of sound in order to remain stable/viable. I do expect Debian to move faster in development as that is one of their core issues in elections today, but I certainly hope it does not try to develop everything as unstable or worse.
When you consider how many people today are still using Windows 98 and Windows 2K, it's pretty obvious that software no longer needs to be released on a monthly basis. I would give the linux community the same credit with Debian as proof of it's success.
While I think continued development is important, the focus needs to be on stability and reliability. There is little gained if you use the latest and greatest but can't boot your machine or spend a weekend a month trying to figure out what broke in the last series of upgrades. Not all of us have the time to spend on that kind of work.
I would much rather have a distribution that allows me to do what I want to do rather then spending my time trying to figure out what it's doing. I think that is why I quit using Windows in the first place. That is also why I quit a number of other distros and landed on Debian. Do you have any idea what it is like having mail servers, web servers, and print servers working so long and so reliably that you forget they are even there?
So before you make your 1000 posts about how fucking slow Debian is, remember that good things come to those who wait.
They have asked for an open debate. If you express your side of the debate in a realisticly reasonable manner then there might actually be a chance someone will consider your point.
If you approach them with the ravings of a lunatic then you get zero points in the debate.
It would be more fruitful if we considered this a legitimate forum with real listeners then a bitch-blog. The more mature approach will have more impact.
When you consider that the heatsink will consume more power then the computer it's cooling, you've kind of blundered into the Tacoma Narrows Bridge of thermal design. I mean seriously, what is the point in having anything like this unless you are compensating for something else?
My mail server consumes 27 watts. So does my web server. Will it withstand SlashDot? I don't know, I've never posted the URL.
But I don't need it to survive SlashDot. I just need it for what I use it for.
You make an arbitrary decision that a certain group of users, based on account type, should be removed from certain activities. Sounds like prejudice as in pre-judging someones ability based on their account or IP address.
Blocking 25 and forwarding through the ISP is kind of a late concept. Spammers are already changing their trojans to use the ISP mail relay and bypassing all this blocked port 25 bullshit.
Stop treating the symptoms. Stop thinking that spammers are fucking idiots. They are pretty damn smart or at least resourceful enough to figure out nice ways to get around everything that they do.
Understand that you are fighting a multi-billion dollar economic force. It's almost as bad as fight drug trafficking because the Dealers/Spammers have a lot of money to make on this.
Perhaps we can take a clue from Chinese history and how they solved the Opium problem. They executed, on the street, anyone found in possession of or under the influence of opium. Problem was solved in a few months. Think of the effectiveness if spammers were banned from any internet access of any kind (including VOIP, TIVO, bluetooth, SMS,) for a period of XX years and trojans were blocked until fixed.
I do think the idea of shutting down trojan machines makes more sense than blocking port 25. Most users don't know what port 25 is, but they sure understand denied service.
Both of these concepts have a potential flaw. Burden of Proof.
If someone is using my email address for fraudulent headers to make it appear that I am sending the spam, is that sufficient for them to shut me down? Do I have to prove that the email which I do not have a copy of, did indeed not come from me?
Based on how ISP's have behaved in the past, they would be more likely to arbitrarily shut someone down because their either triggered a spam filter erroniously (false positive) or got their email address put into the spam headers.
I do not agree that there should be a nominal fee applied to someone who is hosting their own mail server. On the contrary I should be getting refund on the basis of lower costs are realized against my account since I have zero email disk usage on their servers and have fewer help desk calls. The uber-geek types only need to call the ISP when the connection is down or blocked.
Remember the EU was the body that forced American laws on steel exportation to change. You may say they have no constitution, but they are not without their powers.
Too bad the UN can't levy some fines against MSFT, it would go along ways to mitigating their debts as well.
I've been subscribed to the Debian users list for years. They get a lot of mail, but most of it is from users who generally score above the baboon on the UF intelligence test. In short, they are generally technically adept questions that have some thought behind them. Not all, but a lot of them.
I spend a year subscribed to the SuSE users list and have quite a different impression. They score around mollusk. The questions are the most annoying and obvious questions. I clearly reminded me of a gaggle of Windows Users more than anything else.
As Open Source software goes mainstream, we will be reminded that mainstream is different. They are not problem solvers like the more stereotypical geek community. They like things that work, but when they don't work, regardless of the reason, they are a bit lost.
If you make a great product, not only will the great people use it.
Too bad they didn't use AMD CPU's. For the money you pay, they tend to be better. Maybe I missed something on this one, but for all my home computers they've been really excellent.
I spent almost a year running SuSE. Trying to get RPM's to install, even from their own website was pretty fucking frustrating. Talking to other friends who have used deb and rpm they agree on the observations.
It's just not as good. Try it yourself. Here's something I've done a few times over the years, see if you can do that same thing. Take a debian distribution and upgrade it from Stable to Unstable (the whole thing) and then downgrade it back to Stable (the whole thing). Mine still works just fine. Can you take an RPM distribution and upgrade/downgrade it over several years of software versions, including the kernel and libs, and back again.
Does it still work? Can you do this without running into any dependency resolutions that lock up the process?
My experiences with portage have been poor. They have a not-so-user friendly method of resolving new packages, especially the config files. This is my opinion based on comparisons with Debian packages.
About the only thing that Gentoo is really lacking in, for me, is the superb manner in which Debian manages new configuration options and their configuration scripts. In Debian, you have to make a conscious effort to over write a config file. I did this way too many times with Gentoo entirely by accident. I kind of freaked out when I realized that Gentoo wasted my/etc/fstab. It was my fault, but I was still surprised that it was possible using the tools.
Despite the ability for me to kill my system, I still think Gentoo is pretty cool. I just can't run it on any of my systems because I can't afford the configuration accidents.
If the.deb packaging was inferior why is this the selection of linspire/lindows, unbuntu? They seem rather successful distros right now.
Why is RPM picking up a packaging model from.deb? Isn't copying the highest form of flattery?
Gentoo didn't use DEB. My point isn't a pro-debian packaging system but that the newer distros of the last several years have all been non-RPM based systems.
It will be a bit strange having an RPM-based distribution out there, but now we have YUM that provides the required functionality that RPM lacks, such as automatic dependency resolution, ala portage or apt.
I think you are missing the point.
The question a lot of the initial posts are centered on is, "Why would you start yet another distro based on an already proven sub-standard packaging system?". It doesn't make any sense unless you plan on using the Chewbakka Defense.
I would be a heck of a lot more thrilled if someone backed up a square and developed a new and improved packaging system that tries to account for the shortcomings of all the others.
Please don't continue to support a packaging system that has fundamental flaws to it.
Why do you think there are so many DEB based distros out there today? Because Debian is free? So is Fedora, isn't it? Maybe it's the packaging is better than RPM.
Why are all the RPM based distros shipping with their own cobbled version of apt-get? Maybe it's the packaging concept is better than RPM.
Why didn't Gentoo use RPM?
Slackware still isn't RPM based and they are doing well enough thank you.
I'm getting a little tired of all these distros popping up every two weeks claiming to be the latest and greatest since sliced bread. I don't even thing the facade of community based means a whole lot these days. There's been a few good ones with a fundamental approach that's different, but not a lot.
The Dutch should be singled out as a great example of the scientific and engineering devolopment entity that made the Renaissance possible. Without the open participation and sharing of knowledge social and cultural progress would be at a standstill.
If you don't believe me, think where we would be without the Guttenburg printing press or how much information was flowing on the internet when it first came out and was an open community of academians and researchers.
When commercial jet airlines first developed, the BOAC had a plane called the Comet. It was the first plane to experience problems with metal fatigue and stress cracks. The industry at that time was very involved in finding solutions to problems and making better planes. As the direct result of this, the companies involved would share any and all information available in terms of problems and solutions in order to develop the entire industry rather than attempt to promote their own agendas.
This is a significant, albeit old, example of the synergy that can exist when information is shared freely rather than traded as a commodity. Unfortunately US industry, judicial, and legislation seem to have forgotten some of these lessons.
These Dutch aren't so "Freaky Deaky" but truely a credit and an example. Knowing the US, we'll probably bomb them because of some bullshit Patriot Act IP terrorist clause. The contrast makes me ill.
Rather than thinking about how wrong these idiot people are and spouting off about how super wonderful your Linux experience has been, let's consider why these answers were presented.
As a Linux User, I would have selected a different list of priorities in the survey:
Security
Customization
Cost of Ownership
Vendor independence
NOTE: Vendor independence goes on the bottom because you are still hooked into some variation of vendor dependency based on RPM/DEB packaging and configuration approaches. Minor at best.
What I find really shocking about this is the idea of Security. Apparently an undertanding of Security is rather lacking with the survey group. It's so contradictory to my experiences that I'm not even sure how they could have gotten there. But it needs a little more noise from the Open Source advocates.
This is your experience, and mine. But it's hardly universal.
I've manage to fix things on Linux machines over the phone without looking at them. At the same time I can completely waste a Windows XP system in seconds. Different paradigms.
Apparently I've been doing this long enough to recognize that most of what I know about computers doesn't apply to the Windows operating system anymore. Does that make it good/bad? Not really, but I'm no longer the family Help Desk.
Slashdot Mirror
Never use a "point zero" release on something you want to work all the time.
In this case it might be prudent to wait until 8.0 has a bit more shake-down before you convert all your databases to it.
Why do you say that?
Can you please cite some examples where autoconf is lacking and provide cases where there is an existing software which addresses this shortcoming?
I know it's very easy to make a statement that something is bad, but to be truely useful information it helps to provide specifics.
You can't do that with Fedora or Suse, can you?
I don't know if you are upgrading from stable or not, but you need to upgrade using 'apt-get dist-upgrade' and sometimes need to run it more than once. This prevents things from getting screwed up during the installation process.
I spent a weekend doing accessability evaluations on computers. The assignment was for Windows, but the teacher let me use Linux since that was all I had. Turns out my Debian-Linux distrobution had far more accessability features available than anything Windows had. If I had a microphone and a few cameras I could really go to town. But it is worth mentioning that the Linux community as a whole and Debian in particular has done a better than industry standard job at this>
All you wankers out there slamming Debian for being slow to release can just push off!
I am glad that Debian is as stable as it is. Linux has certainly reached the point today where software does not have to develop at the speed of sound in order to remain stable/viable. I do expect Debian to move faster in development as that is one of their core issues in elections today, but I certainly hope it does not try to develop everything as unstable or worse.
When you consider how many people today are still using Windows 98 and Windows 2K, it's pretty obvious that software no longer needs to be released on a monthly basis. I would give the linux community the same credit with Debian as proof of it's success.
While I think continued development is important, the focus needs to be on stability and reliability. There is little gained if you use the latest and greatest but can't boot your machine or spend a weekend a month trying to figure out what broke in the last series of upgrades. Not all of us have the time to spend on that kind of work.
I would much rather have a distribution that allows me to do what I want to do rather then spending my time trying to figure out what it's doing. I think that is why I quit using Windows in the first place. That is also why I quit a number of other distros and landed on Debian. Do you have any idea what it is like having mail servers, web servers, and print servers working so long and so reliably that you forget they are even there?
So before you make your 1000 posts about how fucking slow Debian is, remember that good things come to those who wait.
Don't be a jerk.
They have asked for an open debate. If you express your side of the debate in a realisticly reasonable manner then there might actually be a chance someone will consider your point.
If you approach them with the ravings of a lunatic then you get zero points in the debate.
It would be more fruitful if we considered this a legitimate forum with real listeners then a bitch-blog. The more mature approach will have more impact.
No Shit!!
When you consider that the heatsink will consume more power then the computer it's cooling, you've kind of blundered into the Tacoma Narrows Bridge of thermal design. I mean seriously, what is the point in having anything like this unless you are compensating for something else?
My mail server consumes 27 watts. So does my web server. Will it withstand SlashDot? I don't know, I've never posted the URL.
But I don't need it to survive SlashDot. I just need it for what I use it for.
You make an arbitrary decision that a certain group of users, based on account type, should be removed from certain activities. Sounds like prejudice as in pre-judging someones ability based on their account or IP address.
Blocking 25 and forwarding through the ISP is kind of a late concept. Spammers are already changing their trojans to use the ISP mail relay and bypassing all this blocked port 25 bullshit.
Stop treating the symptoms. Stop thinking that spammers are fucking idiots. They are pretty damn smart or at least resourceful enough to figure out nice ways to get around everything that they do.
Understand that you are fighting a multi-billion dollar economic force. It's almost as bad as fight drug trafficking because the Dealers/Spammers have a lot of money to make on this.
Perhaps we can take a clue from Chinese history and how they solved the Opium problem. They executed, on the street, anyone found in possession of or under the influence of opium. Problem was solved in a few months. Think of the effectiveness if spammers were banned from any internet access of any kind (including VOIP, TIVO, bluetooth, SMS,) for a period of XX years and trojans were blocked until fixed.
I do think the idea of shutting down trojan machines makes more sense than blocking port 25. Most users don't know what port 25 is, but they sure understand denied service.
Both of these concepts have a potential flaw. Burden of Proof.
If someone is using my email address for fraudulent headers to make it appear that I am sending the spam, is that sufficient for them to shut me down? Do I have to prove that the email which I do not have a copy of, did indeed not come from me?
Based on how ISP's have behaved in the past, they would be more likely to arbitrarily shut someone down because their either triggered a spam filter erroniously (false positive) or got their email address put into the spam headers.
I do not agree that there should be a nominal fee applied to someone who is hosting their own mail server. On the contrary I should be getting refund on the basis of lower costs are realized against my account since I have zero email disk usage on their servers and have fewer help desk calls. The uber-geek types only need to call the ISP when the connection is down or blocked.
Remember the EU was the body that forced American laws on steel exportation to change. You may say they have no constitution, but they are not without their powers.
Too bad the UN can't levy some fines against MSFT, it would go along ways to mitigating their debts as well.
It's going to be the price of popularity.
I've been subscribed to the Debian users list for years. They get a lot of mail, but most of it is from users who generally score above the baboon on the UF intelligence test. In short, they are generally technically adept questions that have some thought behind them. Not all, but a lot of them.
I spend a year subscribed to the SuSE users list and have quite a different impression. They score around mollusk. The questions are the most annoying and obvious questions. I clearly reminded me of a gaggle of Windows Users more than anything else.
As Open Source software goes mainstream, we will be reminded that mainstream is different. They are not problem solvers like the more stereotypical geek community. They like things that work, but when they don't work, regardless of the reason, they are a bit lost.
If you make a great product, not only will the great people use it.
Too bad they didn't use AMD CPU's. For the money you pay, they tend to be better. Maybe I missed something on this one, but for all my home computers they've been really excellent.
That's a strange comment to make concerning the age of Fedora. RedHat is pretty old...
Dependency Hell?
I spent almost a year running SuSE. Trying to get RPM's to install, even from their own website was pretty fucking frustrating. Talking to other friends who have used deb and rpm they agree on the observations.
It's just not as good. Try it yourself. Here's something I've done a few times over the years, see if you can do that same thing. Take a debian distribution and upgrade it from Stable to Unstable (the whole thing) and then downgrade it back to Stable (the whole thing). Mine still works just fine. Can you take an RPM distribution and upgrade/downgrade it over several years of software versions, including the kernel and libs, and back again.
Does it still work? Can you do this without running into any dependency resolutions that lock up the process?
My experiences with portage have been poor. They have a not-so-user friendly method of resolving new packages, especially the config files. This is my opinion based on comparisons with Debian packages.
About the only thing that Gentoo is really lacking in, for me, is the superb manner in which Debian manages new configuration options and their configuration scripts. In Debian, you have to make a conscious effort to over write a config file. I did this way too many times with Gentoo entirely by accident. I kind of freaked out when I realized that Gentoo wasted my /etc/fstab. It was my fault, but I was still surprised that it was possible using the tools.
Despite the ability for me to kill my system, I still think Gentoo is pretty cool. I just can't run it on any of my systems because I can't afford the configuration accidents.
If the .deb packaging was inferior why is this the selection of linspire/lindows, unbuntu? They seem rather successful distros right now.
Why is RPM picking up a packaging model from .deb? Isn't copying the highest form of flattery?
Gentoo didn't use DEB. My point isn't a pro-debian packaging system but that the newer distros of the last several years have all been non-RPM based systems.
I think you are missing the point.
The question a lot of the initial posts are centered on is, "Why would you start yet another distro based on an already proven sub-standard packaging system?". It doesn't make any sense unless you plan on using the Chewbakka Defense.
I would be a heck of a lot more thrilled if someone backed up a square and developed a new and improved packaging system that tries to account for the shortcomings of all the others.
Mod this up.
These distros are the fragmentation of Linux that mirrors the fragmentation of Unix in the 1900's.
Sure, variety is good. It's essential. But resources can get spread pretty thin too. It's a trade off that we have to manage.
Please don't continue to support a packaging system that has fundamental flaws to it.
Why do you think there are so many DEB based distros out there today? Because Debian is free? So is Fedora, isn't it? Maybe it's the packaging is better than RPM.
Why are all the RPM based distros shipping with their own cobbled version of apt-get? Maybe it's the packaging concept is better than RPM.
Why didn't Gentoo use RPM?
Slackware still isn't RPM based and they are doing well enough thank you.
I'm getting a little tired of all these distros popping up every two weeks claiming to be the latest and greatest since sliced bread. I don't even thing the facade of community based means a whole lot these days. There's been a few good ones with a fundamental approach that's different, but not a lot.
Have you ever sat on a committee where the main element is competition? Cooperation? Which is better?
Keep it up Microsoft, you are well on your way to becoming a real P.I.T.A.
Microsoft, the E-CockTease in software.
Enough of the fucking Doctor Evil posts...
The Dutch should be singled out as a great example of the scientific and engineering devolopment entity that made the Renaissance possible. Without the open participation and sharing of knowledge social and cultural progress would be at a standstill.
If you don't believe me, think where we would be without the Guttenburg printing press or how much information was flowing on the internet when it first came out and was an open community of academians and researchers.
When commercial jet airlines first developed, the BOAC had a plane called the Comet. It was the first plane to experience problems with metal fatigue and stress cracks. The industry at that time was very involved in finding solutions to problems and making better planes. As the direct result of this, the companies involved would share any and all information available in terms of problems and solutions in order to develop the entire industry rather than attempt to promote their own agendas.
This is a significant, albeit old, example of the synergy that can exist when information is shared freely rather than traded as a commodity. Unfortunately US industry, judicial, and legislation seem to have forgotten some of these lessons.
These Dutch aren't so "Freaky Deaky" but truely a credit and an example. Knowing the US, we'll probably bomb them because of some bullshit Patriot Act IP terrorist clause. The contrast makes me ill.
Rather than thinking about how wrong these idiot people are and spouting off about how super wonderful your Linux experience has been, let's consider why these answers were presented.
As a Linux User, I would have selected a different list of priorities in the survey:
- Security
- Customization
- Cost of Ownership
- Vendor independence
NOTE: Vendor independence goes on the bottom because you are still hooked into some variation of vendor dependency based on RPM/DEB packaging and configuration approaches. Minor at best.What I find really shocking about this is the idea of Security. Apparently an undertanding of Security is rather lacking with the survey group. It's so contradictory to my experiences that I'm not even sure how they could have gotten there. But it needs a little more noise from the Open Source advocates.
This is your experience, and mine. But it's hardly universal.
I've manage to fix things on Linux machines over the phone without looking at them. At the same time I can completely waste a Windows XP system in seconds. Different paradigms.
Apparently I've been doing this long enough to recognize that most of what I know about computers doesn't apply to the Windows operating system anymore. Does that make it good/bad? Not really, but I'm no longer the family Help Desk.