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Debian Editorial

Debian: A Brief Retrospective 258

Posted by Hemos from the looking-back-in-the-past dept.
IanMurdock writes "This weekend, Debian turned 10. To mark the occasion, I've written a retrospective, published at LinuxPlanet. There's also a very nice piece, based in part on my early writings about Debian as well as the retrospective, at internetnews.com."
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Debian: A Brief Retrospective More

Debian: A Brief Retrospective

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  • Woohoo! (Score:5, Funny)

    by JoeLinux ( 20366 ) <joelinux@ g m a i l . c om> on Monday August 18, 2003 @02:11PM (#6725145)
    So, when do we throw a Debian party, have cake and ice cream, and play pin the tail on Bill Gates?

    • Re:Woohoo! (Score:5, Funny)

      by Penguinshit ( 591885 ) on Monday August 18, 2003 @02:19PM (#6725243) Homepage Journal
      The "Celebration" package is currently in the Planning tree undergoing development. Following some enhancements and critical bug fixes it will be released to the Decorating tree while the community decides on a proper color for the paper bunting, and whether to tape, tack, or nail it to the wall or ceiling. Only then will it be released to the Party tree.

      It should be ready some time in 2008, at which point the "Ano-15" package will be in the Planning tree.

      (and yes, I'm a die-hard Debian user)

    • Re:Woohoo! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 18, 2003 @02:21PM (#6725260)
      I still consider myself somewhat of a linux newbie, but I've learned as much as I need to manage a few small servers.

      My day job is selling medical equipment on the internet but I'm also the "computer guy" for the company I work at. Which btw has the added benefit of some extra job security, because no one else knows how to fix the network when it breaks.

      I started tinkering with RedHat and Mandrake about 3 years ago, and have recently installed Debian on a little backup server we have here at work. What a breath of fresh air! I am so glad to be out of RPM hell - those of you who have tried it know how frustrating it is to try and install an RPM, only to find out that you need files A, B, and C to make it work. Then you find out A, B, and C need X, Y, and Z, etc. etc. and that eventually you need an entirely new kernel. You can spend hours trying to fuss with those dependencies. Ugh.

      Now with debian it's as simple as:

      apt-get install whatever

      and bam, you're done! It's awesome! I had a backup server with trouble ticket system up and running in my office here within a few hours (and probably would have been faster if I was more expert).

      The Debian apt system is simply awesome, and I highly recommend it for anyone who wants a stable, easy to maintain linux box.

      • Re:Woohoo! (Score:2, Informative)

        by borggraefe ( 221491 )
        Apt also exists for RPM (http://apt4rpm.sourceforge.net/). When you install it package handling with RadHat or SuSE is as convenient as with Debian.

      • Re:Woohoo! (Score:2, Informative)

        by irix ( 22687 )

        How many times does it have to be said that RPM is not comparable to apt?

        RPM is the package format, like dpkg (.deb). You should compare apt on Debian to up2date [redhat.com], Red Carpet [ximian.com], YaST [www.suse.de], URPMI [linux-mandrake.com] or even apt for RPM [freshrpms.net].

        I am tired or Debian or (help us) Gentoo users raving about "RPM hell" out of ignorance. Debian with apt has some nice things going for it, including the amount of software available in "testing" and "unstable" (as compared to what is offered by RedHat through up2date or Ximian through Red Carpet). T

        • Re:Woohoo! (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Rhone ( 220519 )
          Every time Debian or apt gets mentioned, Person A complains about the whole "RPM hell" thing and how nice apt-get in Debian is. And every time that happens, Person B comes along and berates Person A for not knowing that apt (and other things that serve similar purposes) can be used with rpms as well as debs.

          In all those cases, Person B is quite correct, of course, but perhaps we should be pondering this question: "Why exactly do people persist in associating dependency problems with RedHat and nice easy a

          • I think you see the "dependency hell" thing persists for several reasons:

            1. As you point out, things like up2date were not immediately obvious. However, newer RedHat distros put a notification applet in the gnome 2 tray that links to up2date - very hard to miss. And Red Carpet is immediately obvious to XD2 users.
            2. People want to try out the latest software. The hundreds of maintainers putting packages into unstable make this a lot easier on Debian - RedHat users probably have to wait until the next release u
      • Now with debian it's as simple as:

        apt-get install whatever

        and bam, you're done!

        There's no step three? There's no set three!

  • apt get retrospective (Score:5, Funny)

    by Picass0 ( 147474 ) on Monday August 18, 2003 @02:11PM (#6725151) Homepage Journal
    I love apt get. It's always so much easier than reading the article.

  • Here's looking at you, kid (Score:5, Funny)

    by flicken ( 182650 ) <flicken-slashdot&flicken,net> on Monday August 18, 2003 @02:13PM (#6725177) Homepage
    Thanks to the Debian team of programmers for a job well done. I've been using Debian for the past 4 years, and have found it to be an extremely easy to use distribution.

    My hat is off to you, Ian Murdock.

  • Watch out for those teen years (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 18, 2003 @02:14PM (#6725190)
    Pretty soon, Debian is going to want to drive, and of course, it'll want it's own car. Curfew? Good luck with that. And then, just when things seem to calm down, bam, you have to pay for college, or it knocks some girl up. It never ends.

    • Re:Watch out for those teen years (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 18, 2003 @02:17PM (#6725210)
      Right... but Debian's female and only your daughter in law. So, pretty soon she's wearin' those tiny little micro ATX cases, a little bit of Mo/Bo hanging out the bottom, a couple BIG fans up front blowin' 24/7 that you cant stop thinking about . Damn...

  • my thoughts on Debian. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by garcia ( 6573 ) * on Monday August 18, 2003 @02:14PM (#6725196)
    What do I think Debian should do next? As the Linux world's leading non-commercial, community-driven distribution, Debian can lead the way in preserving the fragile Linux ecosystem, if it sets its mind to it.

    Debian is NOT going to preserve anything. If it continues on its current path (which is fine for me as I am a Debian user) it will find that it is cornered it its own niche.

    The rest of the Linux community is moving FORWARD towards the mainstream. Debian remains locked in its "old fashioned ways" and will never be a leader in anything (as far as the MAJORITY will be concerned).

    People want ease of use, ease of installation, and commercial applications to be included. They don't want to have to find them somewhere else, manually add a deb repository, and then install.

    I have to say that I am nearly 100% pleased with Debian. That's not to say that is what is going to matter in the future. I like staying away from the current direction that Linux is moving but I don't believe that the rest of the community necessarily believes that's the best way to go.

    That's my worthless .02

    • Re:my thoughts on Debian. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Dan Ost ( 415913 ) on Monday August 18, 2003 @02:52PM (#6725539)
      If people want commercial applications, then let some other group build
      a Debian based distrobution that includes the software they think people
      want.

      What is so hard to understand?
    • I like staying away from the current direction that Linux is moving but I don't believe that the rest of the community necessarily believes that's the best way to go.

      When people talk about where Linux is going like it's a bus (or bandwagon) I get confused. Who says Debian should be the Linux platform for mainstream commercial apps when MS is overthrown? (If any of that happens; I'm not saying it will.)

      Talking about "the Linux community" is like trying to talk about "the Slashdot community"...people try t
    • If everybody's switching to commercial, polished, ,uniformized versions of Linux, you can BET Debian's not going to thread that road. Indeed, innovation has been going a bit slow over the last half of the decade, but I put that on the extreme need for Linux to prove itself in high-demand production environments. Once we're all really accustomed to a really stable development model around Linux and the Debian community (esp. around "core" packages), I really expect someone to come up with some really funky

    • "Moving forward" (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Theatetus ( 521747 ) on Monday August 18, 2003 @04:17PM (#6726411) Journal
      Debian remains locked in its "old fashioned ways" and will never be a leader in anything

      In interest of disclosure: I use RedHat at work and Gentoo at home.

      I personally don't have Debian on any computer I am responsible for. That said, I want Debian to exist. I don't want it to "lead"; I want it to be a sort of reference distro for the rest of us. If I see a package in Debian's stable branch I'm pretty confident that it's a reliable version of that application. No other distro, not even RH Enterprise, gets that much trust from me (though RHE comes close).

      Debian's slow package release cycle is a feature, not a bug.

    • Yeah,

      the majority. That crowd of farseeing Wizards, who landed on Microsoft.

  • It's Unfortunate (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 18, 2003 @02:15PM (#6725200)
    It kind of sucks to read about all the great ideas and ideals that Debian represents and then get a dose of the real Debian community in #debian.

    • Re:It's Unfortunate (Score:3, Insightful)

      by prepp ( 465299 )
      i have to agree with that though, seriously #debian at freenode and at other networks are just fucking sad, mostly because of the abundance of elitists and zealots..

    • Re:It's Unfortunate (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Bootsy Collins ( 549938 ) on Monday August 18, 2003 @03:10PM (#6725760)

      It kind of sucks to read about all the great ideas and ideals that Debian represents and then get a dose of the real Debian community in #debian.

      There are a fair number of assholes and jerks in #debian@freenode, it's true. But that sort of thing happens in any community. No matter what the subject, there will be people who get their entire sense of self-worth from treating those less-far-along like crap.

      The key is to realize that there are other avenues for help. The debian-user mailing list [debian.org], in contrast to #debian, is almost always friendly (even when someone does something stupid, the response may be stern, but almost never *mean*); and it's tremendously more informative/educational/useful. I highly recommend it.

  • My favorite computing experience ever. (Score:5, Informative)

    by niko9 ( 315647 ) on Monday August 18, 2003 @02:17PM (#6725212)
    I'm nowhere being a linux guru, and I'm sure there will be the usual Debian trolls, but after getting through the initial Debian installation as a new Linux user, it has been one of the most satisfying computing experiences I have had in a long time.

    It still boggles my mind that my Thinkpad has been running the same initial installation for the last 2 years, without so much as a hiccup.

    Everyday I appreciate all the hard (volunteer no less) that has gone into this hodgepodge of kernels and free software that I can use as I see fit.

    My thanks to all the persons that make Debian what it is.
    • I have had it running on my Gateway 333 for a while now, only thing is mp3s skip sporadically, just cuz it is so slow, they skip in Windoze too. I like it, people like to pick on things that are popular just to be "different", I am not ashamed to admit I like Debian. I like the network install idea, so you only install what you want/need, without bloat. It is best done with a tour guide, ie. elder geek (that isn't a dickhead). It works fine for me, I am not on the bleeding edge of technology anyway. Just
    • "It still boggles my mind that my Thinkpad has been running the same initial installation for the last 2 years, without so much as a hiccup."

      I had Win2K running on my development machine for 3.5 years without a hiccup. The only reason I reinstalled was because I (from a Mandrake dual boot on a new hard drive) over-wrote part of the partition when I screwed up installing Grub to the wrong location, and then screwed up further by trashing too much trying to recover using dd.

      But yeah, Debian is great if yo

  • What Next? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rwiedower ( 572254 ) on Monday August 18, 2003 @02:18PM (#6725220) Homepage
    What do I think Debian should do next? As the Linux world's leading non-commercial, community-driven distribution, Debian can lead the way in preserving the fragile Linux ecosystem, if it sets its mind to it.

    How about a robust, secure, directory service integrated into the distribution itself? Something that slaps NIS around and isn't vaporware like Ophion [sourceforge.net]. That alone could be a huge killer app that would kelp those of us in corporate environments who want to move to debian as a workstation based solution.

  • Looking and Debian versus Slackware (Score:5, Interesting)

    by TWX ( 665546 ) on Monday August 18, 2003 @02:20PM (#6725245)
    It's kind of surprising to me. About four years ago, I would have said that for the non-commercial distributions, Slackware reigned easily at the top. They had decent integration, fairly acceptable release timing, and their installer was beautifully easy to use. At that time, Debian still had dselect as the primary tool, which was just painful, a problem with reliably functional ISO images for download, but they had a decent package system in the works.

    Today, I'm having a hard time justifying keeping my Slackware install in place on my workstation. It's running 8.0, and I've manually updated enough stuff because of the lag in Slackware's development that I doubt an upgrade of sorts would work properly, yet I want the goodies that gnome2 provides, which looks too daunting to build by hand, with all of its assorted libraries and tools. So, at this point, switching to Debian, which I know is going to see active development for quite some time, is a very attractive option.

    Debian's usefulness in the last few years gained so much that the aforementioned workstation is only Slackware, or even non-Debian Linux Box in my control.

    The end of dselect being a requirement is probably what prompted that, though I still haven't ever had a successful i386 ISO-based install with it, it's been the two-floppies method.
    • I whole-heartedly disagree. Slackware hasn't been at the top starting when it decided to stay with libc5 and not move along while the other distribs rocketed forward.

      I left Slackware at that time for the simple reason that it was just too difficult to use the latest software.

      Slackware also does not have any easy way to install dependant packages. Who the hell has the time to sit around and find, compile, and install dependencies only to find out you have another one to go?

      Debian solves ALL those issues
      • Well, they upgraded from libc5 later than everyone else, but they did make the change quite some time ago, for Slackware 3.4 or something like that. I remember that it came out the same year that I was a freshman in college, and what a relief that it was. That was more than four years ago. I actually switched BACK from SuSE to Slackware when they got to a modern library.

        I found the wide array of RPM based distros a pain, because meeting package dependency requiremenets was very hard if I didn't stick
      • Slackware has been using glibc for years. It was late to the party, but it's there now. Slackware 9 is far more current than Debian stable, and more reliable (IME) than Debian unstable. I'll admit it's a PITA to upgrade something big like KDE (or Gnome).
      • When I needed to run CVS x, I was able to write a pretty darned simple bash script with some here documents to autogen "fake" 4.2.99 X packages: grep a packages list for 4.2.0, and make dummy packages that don't depend on anything. Install the dummy pkgs, install CVS X, and then the rest of it works happily.

        Be sure to get *all* the X packages, or something will "suggest" your system to become totally hosed!

    • I've tried most of the Linux distros out there... Slackware still remains on my notebook and on my servers.

      Why?

      When it comes right down to it, there is just nothing simple and straightforward like a distribution that doesn't pretend to know more than you do. Dependency tracking simply is not that big of a deal. If I try to run something and I miss a dep, what comes up?

      $ mplayer transformerfire.mpg
      mplayer: error while loading shared libraries: libartsc.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such

  • More retrospectivity (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ChaosMagic ( 657047 ) on Monday August 18, 2003 @02:22PM (#6725268)
    Slightly offtopic, but if you look at the groups here [google.com] you can see the start of some very interesting technologies being discussed through newsgroups.

    It's a shame they seem to tail off around 1995, it would be nice to see some serious newsgroup discussions that occurred during the past seven years... although this lack of serious discussion may coincide with AOL'ers getting newsgroups access.

  • Me, me, me! (Score:5, Funny)

    by tundog ( 445786 ) on Monday August 18, 2003 @02:22PM (#6725272) Homepage
    This weekend, Debian turned 10. To mark the occasion, I've written a retrospective, published at LinuxPlanet. There's also a very nice piece, based in part on my early writings about Debian as well as the retrospective, at internetnews.com."

    Today I wrote a comment on Slashdot about the retrospective on Debian on LinuxPlanet [slashdot.org].There's also a very nice comment, based in part on my early ideas [slashdot.org]from another slashdot story, it is, as well, retrospective.

  • Yeah, but.... (Score:4, Funny)

    by devphaeton ( 695736 ) on Monday August 18, 2003 @02:22PM (#6725273)
    This weekend I celebrated my birthday, and i had a white-frosted carrot cake with a red Debian Swirl on it.

    39 candles.

    29 for me, 10 for Debian.

    w00h00!!

  • This weekend, Debian turned 10..... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    and is still only on version 3. Stable as all hell but always a step behind IMO.
    • I have to second the sentiment about still being on a year old release. I recently inhereited a computer from a guy that was leaving, and I wanted to set up Linux on it. I had had many good experiences with Debian in the past, but the thought of getting 3.0 installed, then updating EVERYTHING was a little more than I wanted. That's the only reason I don't have Debian on this machine right now. Oh well, they've been averaging about 1 release every 1.5-2 years.

      Granted the install is a bit lengthy, but maintai

      • why install the 'stable' 3.0 at all then?

        you can netinstall straight to whatever (stable/testing/unstable) you want. not that upgrading would be much of a chore with apt-get anyways.

        • Good point, it's just that it's hard for me to bring myself to install anything that says "unstable" to a productivity machine...

          And yes, apt does make updating a snap, it's one of the best features of Debian, IMHO. But installing a more recent relase is even easier. Now, I'm not putting down Debian, I love the OS. I just wish they updated a bit more frequently than about once every two years. Debian's great, I just want more of it!

  • Nice article (Score:5, Informative)

    by __aavhli5779 ( 690619 ) on Monday August 18, 2003 @02:24PM (#6725290) Journal
    It reminded me of many of the reasons I chose Debian as my first Linux distribution (I'm with Red Hat now but that's more a matter of convenience than philosophy)

    Debian still stands out as the distro most reflective of the GNU philosophy. Its packaging system is possibly one of the best uses of the GNU development toolchain I've seen, and its division of software between 'free' and 'non-free' in dselect is yet another example that this is the GNU distro.

    I must admit, the project seems to be languishing a bit right now in terms of usage; some of this I blame on the lack of availability of the latest unstable packages (Debian seems to be quite conservative as far as this goes, going so far as to use the 2.2 kernel as its default install option). I also wonder whether the success of more commercial distros has to do with the inclusion of non-free software (especially in the form of drivers) and tools that are contrary to the GNU philosphy, yet more in tune with the needs of business users.

    Regardless of the fact that I am no longer using Debian, it will always hold a special place in my heart. Thanks for all your hard work.
    • Debian still stands out as the distro most reflective of the GNU philosophy.

      Actually, that's not true anymore. Things have changed and Debian is not the best example of free software or GNU. Check out GNU/Linex [linex.org] instead.

      You'll not see a link to Debian from the FSF/GNU sites for this reason. Debian still distributes non-free software. Yes, you can install Debian without the optional non-free stuff, but they really do encourage installing non-free software on your system easily.

      While RMS currently has

  • Slashdot and Debian (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jamie ( 78724 ) * <jamie@slashdot.org> on Monday August 18, 2003 @02:29PM (#6725341) Journal
    All of Slashdot's webheads, and our NFS/daemon machine, run Debian.

    All my Slash test boxes, including the laptop I'm typing on, run Debian.

    Thanks to everyone involved who puts together and maintains the distro. Its package management is top-notch. Excellent work y'all.

  • What I don't get (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 18, 2003 @02:46PM (#6725481)
    ... is that they still do not manage to make installation take less than 5 hours.

    If you know tomsrtbt [toms.net], a rescue disk made (largely) by one person, one wonders why he alone can make PCMCIA support work out of the box while the 1000s of Debian developers are busy discussing if RFCs belong in main or non-free.

    Not that there would be a better distribution than Debian, but tat does not mean there's no room for improvement.

    • Re:What I don't get (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      ... is that they still do not manage to make installation take less than 5 hours.

      Use either:
      Libranet 2.0 (or buy the most current one)
      Knoppix Debian installer

      I have done the Libranet install and it worked flawlessly and didn't require me to configure any hardware. You can have it installed in less than 20 min depending on the speed of your cd-rom drive and other hardware. The actual work of the installation takes about 2-5 minutes, the rest is just waiting for the packages to be installed.

      I've also us
    • Huh? Are you talking about a net installation? It takes maybe 10-15 minutes to install and configure the base system on a reasonably fast machine. If you try to install everything (barring conflicting packages) it'll take rather longer because there are a hell of a lot of packages - but why do that?

  • Decade old installation (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    In 10 years, couldn't they come up with a better installer? We're talking about a flipping decade here.

  • Let's get this straight (Score:5, Interesting)

    by peripatetic_bum ( 211859 ) on Monday August 18, 2003 @03:18PM (#6725844) Homepage Journal
    There a number of reasons why Debian still *is* the superior linux distribution. religion flame war? nope. Just facts.
    Asid from Red Hat which is in the business of big honking big Iron servers,

    1. Debian is the only other real distrubution that has real server admins relying on it.

    2. Developers favor Debian. At first I just found it neat that so many develoers of my favorite apps tended to package for debian, but now it seems that debian is the defactor developer distro. It is stable for developers who want little change or very Unstable ") for those that want the most. I dont think anyother distro seems to based, except again for Red HAt(ie, apps developed only for redhat) Of course, if something is developed for debian only, dont think it can be the case that is is Debian only, I could be wrong but I would liekt o know

    3. Community: It is the largest. Bar None. On IRC there might be anywheres of 500 prople logged in. You can count on at least 1-2 people there that will know what you are tallking about. This is a key feature for why I use debian

  • From the original Murdock post... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by codemachine ( 245871 ) on Monday August 18, 2003 @03:25PM (#6725916)
    2) Debian will contain the most up-to-date of everything.

    My how things have changed.

    6) Debian will make Linux easier for users who don't have access to the
    Internet.

    Debian's main strongpoint is apt-get, which would not be so useful for users with no internet access. The beauty of Debian is that you can install it once and update it forever. Seems Debian's original goals and their current strongpoints are quite different.
    • 2) Debian does have very recent software in unstable and testing. Of course this goal does not mean having just-released software in stable. Debian itself can do very little other than pass along bug reports if the upstream soure is buggy or dangerously unstable; this is not the fault of Debian. The point though, is that this software is available for those who want it, in a very reasonable amount of time. Debian has over 8000 actively maintained packages.

      6) apt-get of course works just fine with a local r

  • Didn't you hear? Debian is dead (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ceswiedler ( 165311 ) * <chris@swiedler.org> on Monday August 18, 2003 @03:30PM (#6725967)
    Seriously though...when I started reading Slashdot several years ago, all of the cool people were Debian users (including Taco, right?). I was just a straightforward Red Hat guy myself (still am).

    But these days, the same voices which always talked about Debian seem to talk about Gentoo, and more to the point...very few people seem to talk about Debian. Apart from turning 10, what's the last major thing it accomplished? I'm sure many people still use it, but the driving force behind it seems to have died. Now it's main distinguishing feature is being the closest-to-official FSF/GNU distro, if you care about stuff like that.

    I know apt is great, and Debian's installer, great, whatever, but really...is it still as big as it was?
    • Debian still makes a wonderful production server in some situations; something Gentoo really isn't up to doing.

      I do think Debian is losing its edge in the developer community though. It used to be that most developers used Debian on their main workstation, but now you are seeing Gentoo mentioned a whole lot. I guess being that Gentoo is bleeding edge and source based, this does make sense.

      Debian is also useful as a base for other distributions. Xandros, Lindows and Libranet are all Debian based. Havin
      • I forgot to mention that Debian is the basis of Knoppix. People have been doing some really neat things with Knoppix and derivatives. I've given it out as a demo CD to a few people, and now they want me to install Linux to their hard drives.

        Having Debian around as a base system for others to build on is really turning out to be a great thing for the community.
      • I do think Debian is losing its edge in the developer community though. It used to be that most developers used Debian on their main workstation, but now you are seeing Gentoo mentioned a whole lot. I guess being that Gentoo is bleeding edge and source based, this does make sense.

        Yes, it does make sense and it just seemed plain weird that many of the maintainer's of the flagship OS of the Free Software movement were surprised that there was a substantial group of users who actually wanted to compile Open
        • "[...] were surprised that there was a substantial group of users who actually wanted to compile Open Source rather than just install binaries."

          Yes, there are also people on workstations who spend all of their time in X, and for some reason still want to boot into a virtual console and execute "startx". I hardly think we need to discuss the usual reasons for this, nor that it would be particularly flattering. If you are building on your own system all or even most of your packages from source, you are alm
    • well, just to assure you.. from netcraft:

      **
      Debian Linux distribution 10 years old today Around the Net
      Following on from the FreeBSD project which celebrated its 10th anniversary a few months ago, the Debian Linux distribution reached the age of 10 today. Debian has been an amateur effort throughout its lifetime, and its success is a testament to how little difference money sometimes makes.

      Despite the abscence of funding, Debian is the second most popular Linux distribution we find on internet web site
    • Well, did you know Debian has more than 8000 actively maintained packages?

      Have you ever run a system out of testing/unstable; within the last 6 months? If you haven't, you should also be cautious of pronouncing Debian to be hopelessly out-dated (not that you did, but that this is no doubt on your mind).

      Is it still as big as it was?

      No, it's bigger.

      Should you care about the Debian Social Contract, even if you aren't into "that sort of thing"? Well, you should, but no, you don't have to, because the Debian
  • Debian is hands down the most superuser-friendly OS on the market today. It doesn't have the shiny candy-like buttons on the installer (which is more bark than bite - it is intimidating but not difficult) - but when it comes to easy remote administration, knowing that the security patches will be there when you need them, and installing just about every open source app you'll need with near zero effort, Debian is without equal.

    I've run servers on 3 or 4 Windowses, half a dozen Linux distros, two BSDs, an

  • hmm (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ShadowRage ( 678728 ) on Monday August 18, 2003 @03:50PM (#6726151) Homepage Journal
    the only thing keeping debian from being another faceless OS out there is its packaging system and stability record. however, the cost of stability comes at lack of updated software. so you end up downloading the non-stable software anyways, so, what's the point of that? only thing that makes it truly great is the apt-get system. its packaging system is much nicer than RPM.. personally I dislike rpm. it's stingy and sometimes more complicated than it should be.. with debian's system it's like, when you select source, you get the damn source code, you dont get a package that you edit files in then rebuild and then install. personally, if opensource wants to free people from microsoft matrix, they gotta appeal to these users, for some people in opnsource, this is a daunting task becuase they cant go below their level of experience, so what you gotta do is test various systems with certain points that offer the greatest ease.. apt-get would be perfect as the dominant packaging system in most linux distros. an installer much like slackware's would make the almost perfect install (blue linux has a nice easy to understand installer as well) things like that are what are going to make the next revolutionary distro. debian is antiquated in many ways. most people I know get it for either 2 things: to be "elite and cool" or for the packaging system. debian would be nothing without it. seeing an apt-get system replace other packaging systems within major linxu distributions would be a nice change. Also, may I point out that really, in the end, linux is linux, each distribution is just a different profile of packages wrapped around a kernel.

  • fond memories of debian (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jaxon6 ( 104115 ) on Monday August 18, 2003 @03:55PM (#6726211)
    I remember using debian to cut my teeth on linux. I had a pc(win95) that was hooked up to the internet, which I needed to ask questions and download stuff with. My gf's grandmother gave me a 386-33 with 8 megs of ram and a 130 meg hdd. All isa slots, AT keyboard, NO cdrom drive(no ide adapter, some proprietary cable or something), only a 1.44 floppy. So, I had my choice of debian, using a floppy install, or .... well, just debian. I forget what debian version it was, but it was the 2.0.36 or so kernel(97-98 timeframe), and I only had like 3 floppies, so I had to keep shuffling disks from the win95 machine to the 386 to install debian using floppies. I finally got the basic install done, and then went to configure isa ne2000 nics using linux, being a complete newbie. There was this dude on yahoo chats who helped out. But, going from newbie to getting a system such as above running, adding ipfwadm to make the box a router, added samba to make it a pdc, played with everything possible(given the constraints). I was even smb-mounting my win95 disk over the network to get more space(of course the box crashed and I had stale mount points, yech- windows). I have to say that after an experience with that, using the hardest possible configuration possible to get debian up and running, all command line on a 386 when my first pc had 8 gig hdd(like I said, this was 97-98) teaches you more than you can imagine. Hell, I ran this box for something like 13 months before I knew what X or kde(1.0 days). I was like 'Woa! Linux can do this?' I figured it was just command line, no gui at all. I recommend this method to learn linux. It'll put you on the track to knowing more than your instructor at RHCE classes(guilty, #808002685906747).

  • Debian books? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ngunton ( 460215 ) on Monday August 18, 2003 @04:16PM (#6726405) Homepage
    I have been using RedHat for the last 3 years, and am currently using 7.3. This is quite nice for me, and I don't want to upgrade to 9.0 (and every year thereafter) when RH end-of-life's 7.3 at the end of this year. I don't like any company forcing me to upgrade... I think a lot of other people feel the same way. I have looked at Debian (and have it installed on one of my partitions now) but to be honest I am a little disturbed by the lack of good Debian books. There just don't seem to be any really good ones out there, let alone recent editions. The most recent is the Debian/GNU Linux Bible, which is 2001, and gets tepid reviews on Amazon. There are, however, tons of Red Hat books, and I am wondering if this says anything about the longevity of Debian going forward? Surely if the publishers thought there was a market out there, then they would be commissioning new and better books on the subject?

    I know all the documentation is "out there" but I've "been there, done that" with regard to rooting out all the distributed sources of documentation which exist on the various topics, and to be honest I don't relish the idea of making my life be "about Debian" for the same amount of time that it took to find out all the little tricks that I now know about my RedHat installation... Switching distributions will never be trivial if you have large pre-existing software packages running. Does anyone have any suggestions for moving away from RedHat, and any reasons why there aren't any good up-to-date books on Debian? I just like having at least one reference on hand - we have good books on Perl, MySQL, Apache, Sendmail - why not Debian as a whole?

    Sorry if this seems negative - it's not really, I will in all likelihood be switching come November when my RH Network subscription expires. I can't get over how Red Hat is turning its back on the small users like me who can't afford at the moment to buy Advanced Server licenses, don't want or need support, but just need the errata updates! I mean, I am trying to develop a business here, and if/when I switch to another distro, I won't be coming back. It's just too much hassle (the small details and differences are the ones that kill you, as I'm sure everyone here will agree)... very short sighted on RedHat's part.

    Red Hat's attitude reminds me of Netscape's just prior to Microsoft destroying them - Netscape seemed to lose interest in the very people that had made them successful, i.e. the small users out there who used their browser. Netscape thought they could instead focus on the corporate server market, and we all know what happened. I tried calling Red Hat about their policy of "end-of-life" for 7.3 and even 8.0, and all the woman I spoke to would say was that I could always buy the Advance Server edition. I explained that I am in that curious middle-ground position of running serious, production servers and yet not being big enough to be able to afford that, and she basically hung up on me. Unbelievable. If that's their attitude, then to be honest I really do hope that they go out of business.

    Suggestions welcomed, and sorry for the rant.
    • From your post, you seem to be interested in using Debian, right now, as an advanced personal/business user. Is that an accurate assessment?

      There is a great wealth of quality documentation and reference information available in electronic form. I know that you would like a dead-tree book, but as a volunteer, non-profit distribution, I don't know that this is the Debian way.

      As you say that you have already had a successful install, there's no need to go over that.

      First, you will want to read the APT HOWTO [debian.org]
  • At the end there, Ian was talking about the future of Debian. I think the creeping, but dramatic, changes in commodity RAM technology are making it possible to run much more powerful systems with less resources. And I believe this will be a huge benefit priomarily to Linux because corporate OS's don't want to work better and faster with fewer hardware resources. That screws up the whole business plan. This is especially true for Apple, but it's also true for Microsoft.
    I may be wrong, but my reading

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