Happy Birthday, Debian! 172
An anonymous reader writes with word that as of today, the Debian project — one of the first distros, and still going strong, not to mention parent or grandparent of many other distros — is 19 years old. "Quoting from the official project history: 'The Debian Project was officially founded by Ian Murdock on August 16th, 1993. At that time, the whole concept of a 'distribution' of Linux was new. Ian intended Debian to be a distribution which would be made openly, in the spirit of Linux and GNU.' Send an appreciation message: http://thanks.debian.net/."
Better than Arch? (Score:3)
Re:Better than Arch? (Score:5, Interesting)
I greatly prefer apt over yum, but that might just be what I'm used to.
Everything just feels wrong when I'm stuck with arch.
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I greatly prefer apt over yum, but that might just be what I'm used to.
Everything just feels wrong when I'm stuck with arch.
Apt has better fit and finish. For example, the default for "do you want to install what you just asked for" is yes in Apt, no in Yum.
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APT still asks, just the default answer is "Yes" where with Yum its "No". So if you don't enter anything and just hit "Enter" it will do what ever the default was. I actually think having "No" as a default is better. After all, you can just run the command again if you accidentally hit Enter with out entering "y" first.
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Re:Better than Arch? (Score:5, Interesting)
To summarize, it's a trade off between stability and having the latest version of packages.
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And if you want the latest newfangled code, enable some of the more adventurous repos and install from them.
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In contrast, I've got a 733MHz machine which has been running Debian for the better part of a decade now - first on Debian 3, and now on 6. I think it's broken a couple times, but never official packages/repos. It's always been the added repositories for things which aren't available in debian (rare/far between), and the fix has never been tedious or outside the package manager itself.
Re:Better than Arch? (Score:5, Interesting)
I suppose that it's long past time that I installed Debian. I've fought through Gentoo army of config files, gone through RPM hell with Red Hat and Mandrake, hacked at the jungle thicket of Fedora and swam in the cool waters of Arch. I've tried two Debian-based distributions, but never install Debian. Does it offer any real advantage over Arch?
Just recently I tried the top 25 free software distributions [as measured by distrowatch.com], one of which was Arch. I have to say Arch was one of the distros I found fun to play with -- the only thing I think is missing is a simple graphical installer. The first set of instructions I found on the Arch website weren't complete concerning the Grub2 install, leading to install and bootup failures, but the "Beginner's Guide" has complete instrcutions for the install. Package installation under arch is super fast. I couldn't get audio working in the VM I was installing it in, but other than that I really liked it.
And I tried Gentoo as well, and I found it just as hateful as I found it in 2003, if not more so. The "install", or shoud I say the compile, took three solid days to install a base system + a base install of KDE 4.8. The 'emerge' command often ran into dependency hell, forcing the use of several switches like 'emerge --newuser --update --deep (package)'. Anytime the USE flags get updated Gentoo wants you to 'emerge @world' to recompile the whole system again, and of course the instructions for intalling KDE4 has you modify the USE flags. I really do love a lot of the documentation I can get from the Gentoo project, but in terms of running it as a distro I want to keep it as far away from me as I can, because frankly I think it's insane.
Debian has a graphical installer, and you can choose several Desktop Environments right at the very start of the install menu. I think it's the only distro (or one of very few) that shows all of the choices of languages in their own native written language rather than the list being all in English. Debian is also the basis for a long list of other distros -- out of the top 25, 12 are Debian derivatives. IMHO the best feature Debian has is the ability to upgrade-in-place -- so you never have to do a reinstall to keep it up-to-date unless you want to. Debian has a lot of developer support behind the project, most of whom are free software purists -- which is generally a good thing. It's one of the very few distros that are based solely on donations and have no private corporation behind them. If you want to know more about Debian, my first suggestion is to watch an intro video given by Bdale Garbee from DebConf11 which I think was well spoken and informative:
http://penta.debconf.org/dc11_schedule/events/804.en.html [debconf.org]
I don't know enough about Arch to give a fair comparison between it and Debian; all I can say for the moment is that I've been running Debian for 13 years, and that in the very limited time I've spent with Arch I've been impressed with it.
The distributions I liked in testing them: Linux Mint Debian, Fedora 17, openSuSE, Debian, Arch, Pear Linux 5 (appearance of Mac OS X), SnowLinux 2 "Ice", and the DVD version of Knoppix 7.03. Distros I did not like: Ubuntu 12.04 (3D, Unity GUI), Mageia 2, PCLinuxOS (only "rpm" lines in /etc/apt/sources.list), Ultimate 3.4 (3D), Gentoo (insane long compiles), Fuduntu (yucky package installer), SolusOS (yucky package installer).
What is the problem with corporate help? (Score:2)
I see no problem with some corporation being associated with the project. If there are reasonable rules, and if the project has a reasonably open governance, corporate help is welcome.
Re:What is the problem with corporate help? (Score:5, Interesting)
I see no problem with some corporation being associated with the project. If there are reasonable rules, and if the project has a reasonably open governance, corporate help is welcome.
To an extent it's fine, but the corporation usually ends up steering the project to some extent. For instance is Ubuntu more community-driven or Cononical driven? Is Fedora community-driven, or is it a platform for developing RHEL? What about Oracle? For instance when I think of Ubuntu, I ask the question "Who made the choice of the 3D Unity interface? Was it the community or was it Cononical?"
Corporations often have different needs than a home user does. Debian, for instance, contains a bunch of niche packages like those used by Amateur Radio operators. These are things you're not likely to see in an "Enterprise" distribution. So what you get as a user does differ depending on who is directing the distribution development. This doesn't make choosing an "Enterprise" distribution wrong of course -- it might be what you need.
We are protected by the fear of forks (Score:3)
Since it is open source, we can always fork it. And normally the fear of forks will stop the corporation from acting too badly - doing evil to open source software do
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Since it is open source, we can always fork it. And normally the fear of forks will stop the corporation from acting too badly - doing evil to open source software does not pay.
In the case of Canonical, we have an additional assurance: it is a private company, which does not have a fiduciary duty to maximize profits. It was founded by Mark Shuttleworth, who is a nice guy and was a Debian Developer.
Yes, I met him in person during DebConf10. Very friendly guy; I saw his talk on the Unity interface. I think the Debian developers have sort of an interesting like(--)standoffish relationship with Mark Shuttleworth. My impression was that he's well respected in the Debian community at the same time that many wish his efforts were in Debian rather than Ubuntu. [Nobody actually voiced this though.]
In the case of Ubuntu, the "evil" was selecting Unity as default. However, Xfce, LXDE, KDE and others are still available, and they are working on GNOBuntu (with the full Gnome, including the Gnome Shell). Despite the hate you see on Slashdot, Ubuntu is still the number 1 distribution - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_(operating_system)#Installed_base [wikipedia.org].
And, personally, I use Unity and like it just fine.
Well, Canonical also pulled the funding of Kubuntu back in February.
http://news.slashdo [slashdot.org]
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I believe that the one that is based on Debian is aimed more @ servers, than @ desktops. Instead of deriving their server version from Ubuntu, Mint went straight w/ Debian
Actually no, both versions of Mint are specifically focused on desktop use. The idea behind Mint Debian is that you can use the actual Debian Testing repositories so that all of that software is then avialable to Mint. [They also state that the Debian-based edition is faster and more responsive than the Ubuntu-based edition.]
I'm sort of tied to Debian Sid/Unstable right now because that's the target for new source package uploads, and I'm getting into Debian development. Also most Debian-based distributi
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I switched to Mint on my laptop last year, tried it for three months, switched back to Ubuntu. Mint just had too many annoyances - a triumph of branding over content (changing the KDE start menu icon seemed to me just insulting). I still run Debian on my servers and have no intention of changing. It's rock solid, which is what a server needs to be.
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I switched to Mint on my laptop last year, tried it for three months, switched back to Ubuntu. Mint just had too many annoyances - a triumph of branding over content (changing the KDE start menu icon seemed to me just insulting). I still run Debian on my servers and have no intention of changing. It's rock solid, which is what a server needs to be.
Hmm okay thanks for letting me know what your experience with Mint was. I've only deployed Mint Debian to one user so far -- it was a laptop with only 256MB of RAM and a low-end videocard, so I deployed it with Xfce. The only issue the user complained about was a sticking Enter key on the keyboard. The user remained happy with that until she upgraded to a different laptop, which came with Windows 7. [And naturally the new laptop didn't come with OS reinstallation disks.]
The icon on the K menu in KDE is
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Mark is basically MIA from Debian, personally I'm surprised they haven't chucked him out of the project yet.
My understanding is that they don't really do that, unless the developer makes an announcement that they're leaving the project.
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Are you being humours with the "con" (ironical? ;-)) or can't you spell canonical?
:-P Apparently it's that I can't spell Canonical.
Do you know what the word means? If not, it's particularly ironic given the content of your post.
"Canonical is the adjective for canon, literally a 'rule', and has come to mean also 'standard', 'typical', or 'unique distinguished exemplar'." - Wikipedia
Haha! Nice -- thanks for pointing out that irony. Sort of fitting. :-P
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Distributions are people, my friend.
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corporate help is fine, i'm sure plenty of corps have helped debian over the years.
corporate dominance OTOH worries me. I'd rather have the descisions about the distro I use argued over by a community than made to fit one corporations needs or wishes possiblly at the expensive of everyone else. Afaict fedora and ubuntu both have some community involvement in the descision making processes but one coroporation (canonical for ubuntu, redhat for fedora) has the ultimate power.
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I've been running Gentoo for years on at least a box or two. It's nice to be able to compile some things the way you want them, instead of how some dissociated package maintainer thinks you want them.
I generally do a stage 3 install, which goes very quickly. My install goes like this: Boot Knoppix, partition and format, wget the appropriate stage, pipe that directly into tar (skipping the disk), and then do the same with portage. A chroot and some mounting of /proc and such later, simply configure lilo
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. IMHO the best feature Debian has is the ability to upgrade-in-place -- so you never have to do a reinstall to keep it up-to-date unless you want to.
Indeed, I have installations of Debian that are 13 years old. They've been through multiple hardware revisions, and are now virtualized, but apt-get dist-upgrade has done the trick all this time.
However, technical achievements aside, it's Debian's policy that's the real star.
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. IMHO the best feature Debian has is the ability to upgrade-in-place -- so you never have to do a reinstall to keep it up-to-date unless you want to.
Indeed, I have installations of Debian that are 13 years old. They've been through multiple hardware revisions, and are now virtualized, but apt-get dist-upgrade has done the trick all this time.
However, technical achievements aside, it's Debian's policy that's the real star.
For the most part I agree concerning Policy, but there are lots of niche areas that Policy doesn't currently cover. To give you an idea of what I mean, there's a whole lot of discussion going on right now on [debian-devel] concerning:
- packages with same binary names in different directories [/usr/sbin vs /usr/bin] /bin with /usr/bin, possibly merging /sbin with /usr/sbin
- possibly merging
- policy issues concerning different init systems [file-rc, systemd, upsta
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X is pretty huge and I'll bet it didn't just do the drivers you need but all of X - then there's KDE and a pile of apps there, I'll bet openoffice was in there too, so it comes down to Gentoo not being fine grained enough to cope with that situation with the options you told it to do (or not clearly telling you the consequences of your choices). I've been there, done that with a little slow fanless VIA system that could actually benefit from specific compiler flags s
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X is pretty huge and I'll bet it didn't just do the drivers you need but all of X - then there's KDE and a pile of apps there, I'll bet openoffice was in there too, so it comes down to Gentoo not being fine grained enough to cope with that situation with the options you told it to do (or not clearly telling you the consequences of your choices).
I followed /etc/X11 and manually set the video driver to either vesa or vmware, but after three days of compiling I was impatient to get the testing I needed to do over w
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/xorg-config.xml [gentoo.org]
and I decided to use 'emerge -pv xorg-drivers'. I was not able to get X to start afterwards. Not a big deal; I ended up using ssh and X forward to do the testing I needed to do. If I was really interested in running Gentoo I probably would have created an xorg.conf file in
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That's a surprise. My 1 day+ compile was on a 667MHz machine with 256MB of RAM.
However, as I was writing before, the idea of Gentoo with optimisation of binaries doesn't really fit IMHO if you can already install a linux distribution with binaries already optimised for the CPU you are using. I get the idea that the transition to 64bit on x86 was when a lot of people were getting some benefit from Gentoo. I can't see how yo
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But optimisation of binaries is not the point of Gentoo. I wonder why this myth still prevails.
The advantages of Gentoo over other distributions are 1) documentation and knowledgable community, 2) flexibility, 3) easy mixing of hand-compiled stuff with the package management stuff.
The disadvantages are 1) compile times 2) although the distro tools are excellent, it's still considerably more complex to use than most, 3) breakage is more likely, so it takes more maintenance than most.
As with ANY distro, it co
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Re:Better than Arch? (Score:5, Insightful)
It doesn't sound like you really know how to use gentoo based on what you're saying. I've built KDE and a system from scratch and it doesn't take one day let alone three.
No, it really took three full days for the base system + base KDE4 within a VM. I used the instralll instructions from Gentoo's website.
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/desktop/kde/kde4-guide.xml [gentoo.org]
Also, don't set USE flags system wid unless you know you want to, that's what /etc/portage/package.use is for.
See the link above; the instructions has one change the USE flags, and then has one run 'emerge -uDNav world'.
You're correct that the USE flag was --newuse and not --newuser. Your comment otherwise was quite rude. Surely using elitism isn't going to help the Gentoo project.
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Surely using elitism isn't going to help the Gentoo project.
It's worked so far, the perceived elitism seems to be all it's got going for it!
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"Anytime the USE flags get updated Gentoo wants you to 'emerge @world' to recompile the whole system again..."
No, you'll just need to recompile the packages affected by the USE flag changes:
emerge --newuse --deep @world
Ah. Okay -- on that I stand corrected, then -- and I appologize for propagating misinformation.
Thanks.
If you're building Chromium, or OO.Org from source on hardware built five years ago, system updates in Gentoo are a bit slow. But, Gentoo is fantastic for doing dev work. More often than not, I'll find that "apt-get build-deps" (or whatever it is that installs the *-dev packages that are required to build a package in the tree from source) just doesn't work. In gentoo: "emerge --only-deps $PACKAGE" *always* works. :)
Debian these days uses an automated build system; part of the reason is to catch issues where "apt-get build-dep (package)" doesn't pull in all of the required "-dev" development packages required to build the source package. This was done because otherwise there were too many "FTBFS" (Fails To Build From Source) problems like you're describing. IIRC I think this might have been something Ubuntu did firs
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the only thing I think is missing is a simple graphical installer
Arch is supposed to be like slackware (vanilla packages, KISS principle) but with rolling updates. The installation just isn't that big of a deal, because the target user already has a plan and knows how to get there. A graphical installer would be a solution looking for a problem. Like slackware and gentoo, arch is intended for people who prefer to be "on their own".
Imagine how ridiculous it would be to complete a fancy, inspiring, totally graphical installation only to be dumped at the command prompt on your first boot. D'oh!
Generally the distributions with graphical installers also set up X and your choice of desktop environment, and this was what I had in mind when I made the comment. [Gentoo is a notable exception here: the Gentoo LiveCD has a graphical installer, which after using leaves you with a text-console-only installation. :-P] In terms of Slackware, today I'd likely choose Vector Linux (which is based on Slackware) rather than Slackware, for the graphical installer and more importantly due to the package manager t
Re:Better than Arch? (Score:5, Informative)
Well, the main selling point for me personally ( used Debian since sarge went stable all those years ago ) is the 3 prong "pick your poison" software model they have. You can either have:
stable - rock solid, very few bugs, what bugs there are are usually not anything major. Can now be kept a little bit more up to date with debian-backports.
testing - except for the feature freeze just before a new stable is released it's basically a "rolling release" with at the very least minimal testing for bugs. Unstable has had no bug reports against packages that go into testing for 2+ weeks. Generally Testing is as stable as any other distributions stable branch while retaining relatively up to date software.
Unstable / SID - bleading edge stuff, pretty much a true "rolling release", gets hardware support the quickest while still retaining full to near full system sanity. As the Debian devs say though, if sid breaks you get to keep the pieces. Breaks a lot of times are on big desktop updates like KDE 3.x > 4.x not having ALL depends uploaded yet , less likely for core components, so you have to watch what exactly is going on with your own system. Some people have had SID run for years with only minor problems.
That and APT, I have had much better luck with dependency tracking with APT than with yum / yast. The only thing that I have run with better depends tracking was portage... but that gets old real fast when you realize you forgot an important USE flag.
Re:Better than Arch? (Score:5, Informative)
I've tried two Debian-based distributions, but never install Debian. Does it offer any real advantage over Arch?
Armies of highly commited package maintainers?
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If you want bleeding edge, Arch is better, but expect to bleed occasionally.
Really? Better than Debian Unstable? Which is what I've been running for over a dozen years now, with very little bleedage.
Not that long ago, pretty much all Debian Developers ran unstable, because you pretty much had to in order to be able to build and upload new packages. Which meant that there was a lot of incentive not to break things too badly. Now, a lot of them are using VMs or chroot jails, but I think the habit of keeping Unstable fairly solid and reliable persists.
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Oh yeah. Arch significantly more bleeding edge than Debian Unstable (IIRC, about 40% out of date, which is really good as these things go). Not making any pretense of patching does help things move quickly.
Contrary to many people, I've had great luck with Arch. Never had any serious breakage. I have on the other hand had huge clusterfucks with Mint and Fedora. If something does break, it's easy to revert back. I think the key is to pacman -Syu on at least a weekly basis to keep the number of updates at an
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For your service startup issue I belive the fix is to rename the S symlink to a K symlink rather than removing it completely. Not sure where I learnt this though.
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I run Debian Testing on my work PC, and never had any issues with it, so I agree that it's quite stable. I've even selectively installed some experimental packages (i.e a more recent version of iceweasel), and it all works flawlessly.
If you're sick of the SysV init system, Debian does have systemd available for use. There are a few issues with it, but they're pretty well documented at http://wiki.debian.org/systemd [debian.org] . I like the SysV system myself, but I'm going to dabble with systemd, just to see how wel
Not the first,but the first to get packaging right (Score:5, Interesting)
I had been used to RedHat, where you'd try to install a package, it would complain about dependencies, and then you'd have to surf the web for someone who had an RPM for that dependency... hopefully a suitable version. FTP it. Try to install that. Of course, that would fail because it, too, had unmet dependencies. So, you'd write down all the stuff that needed and start searching for those... and their dependencies.
When it was all over, you had blown about 3-4 hours and you had about 2 pages of scribbled notes of package names, indented by their order of dependence, crossed out as you installed them.
I think I heard angels singing when I first tried to install something with Debian. It found all of the dependencies (recursing through the entire dependency tree), told me that it was going to go download them all in one shot, and then *did* it. I have not (voluntarily) used anything other than Debian/Ubuntu since.
This kind of package management is taken for granted today, just like so many features in the first iPhone are considered standard on any smartphone. We forget how all of the stuff before it now looks like the stone age.
Debian, we all owe a huge debt to your parents for conceiving you.
The disease was called (Score:2)
RPM hell
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The problem isn't that Debian is basically a PC operating system that you can hack on. That's a worthy thing to be. The problem is people who try to use Debian in the enterprise, or for research or soft
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What are you talking about? Half a dozen packaging frameworks?
Here's how it works: there is the low-level package manger dpkg, which handles the installation of a package. Automatic dependency resolution is provided by libapt-pkg. That's it. That's the packaging system and framework.
Perhaps what confused you was the number of front-end tools built against libapt-pkg. Those are not frameworks; those are applications, and merely give you a choice of your favourite front-end.
Mart
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These things all have partially-overlapping capabilities. They all pass configurations around in strange and inconsistent ways. Some use command args. Some use environment variables. Some check for the presence of certain files that may, or not, exist as a side ef
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Ah, you meant frameworks for creating packages.
Unclear communication does not help your point.
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Strange as it may seem to you, we're not all idiot consumers here on Slashdot. A reasonable operating assumption, and a courteous one, is that in our postings about software systems we're not offering a narrow viewpoint about one narrow aspect of the system but looking at it as a whole, from the perspective of a producer. That your own viewpoint may not reach to this level is no reason to project the same onto others.
Just try to be nice. Looking at your other postin
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Read the title too
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Yet another one here.
Another problem is that these were the ages of under 1GB hard drives you always had to clean up. With RPM you ended up installing all libraries imaginable, just so you don't have to search for packages online. That cost a lot in hard drive space.
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There was also Yggrasil Linux, started in 1992, but it is not alive any more.
Yggdrasil. Use the Norse Luke!
I don't always use Debian (Score:3, Funny)
Yay! debian! (Score:2)
I switched to debian recently from xubuntu.
(Currently with 64bit squeeze)
The only issue I have is with the binary firmware festidiousness. I understand it is debian and that they are sticklers for RMH's version of "free", but would giving me the option to load closed firmware blobs for my wifi card from a USB stick during install be such a terrible thing?
It didn't stop me from loading the non-free packages I needed after install or anything, it was just a little irritating to have to use another PC to pull
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^^RMS! RMS! I don't see how I managed to put RMH.... I blame lack of coffee.
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It actually DOES allow you to do that. Do your install in expert mode and stop being a sissy! :)
How does Debian beat Ubuntu? (Score:2)
Why did you abandon Ubuntu?
For the archs that both support, I don't see any advantage Debian has over Ubuntu.
Yes, Debian stable is extremely stable. But it is only supported for three years or so, and the packages in it come already obsolete. For both of these reasons, you are forced to upgrade to a new Debian version within months after its release.
Ubuntu LTS, on the other hand, comes with updated packages and is supported for 5 years. For both these reasons, you
Re:How does Debian beat Ubuntu? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because I am tired of bone headed decisions made to keep up with fashion or "increase market share" whatever that really means. I want stability, not some lame attempt to bring a tablet UI to my desktop/laptop. Debian is built by people who care deeply about open source (usable) software, not whether or not the distribution gains market share. That suits me just fine.
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While true for mainline ubuntu, xubuntu uses xfce by default (why I liked it), but still uses the ubuntu repositories, and suffers from cannonocial's poor decision making in the politics of the distro. Debian takes a more staid approach.
Debian defaults with legacy Gnome, but I switched to XFCE almost imediately, so its a nonissue.
There aren't any advantages over xubuntu other than not dealing with cannonocial, and I just wanted to give it a try. Had an HDD failure awhile back, (primary ./ volume) so I had t
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What is the problem with Canonical (Score:2)
What is the problem with Canonical?
Slashdotters did not like Unity, but Ubuntu still has XFCE, LXDE, KDE and other options. They are now working on GNOBuntu, a full Gnome (with the Gnome Shell and everything) flavor of Gnome.
And I like Unity just fine. Ubuntu is still t
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Because I am tired of bone headed decisions made to keep up with fashion or "increase market share" whatever that really means. I want stability, not some lame attempt to bring a tablet UI to my desktop/laptop. Debian is built by people who care deeply about open source (usable) software, not whether or not the distribution gains market share. That suits me just fine.
Wish I had mod points again so I could pull you above 0.
The decisions and direction of Ubuntu are disturbing when considering longer-term usage. LTS releases last for 5 years, but will you really still want to be using Ubuntu 5 years from now?
I just installed 12.04 Server and they have added an advertisement to the MOTD for their paid Landscape service, an ad which is displayed at every logon. Not only that, but the new "better" dynamic MOTD system is very opaque and not easy to see how you can customize
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A good reason to abandon Ubuntu for Debian is that Ubuntu is fragile.
If you are used to the *nix way of doing things your way, you will soon find out that with all the Ubuntu-specific patches and scripts, you are bound to use the Ubuntu tools or break your system.
I'll give an example: a friend wanted to use an ath9k based WiFi chipset before support was mainstream. I checked and found that Ubuntu supported Debian's module-assistant to custom-build kernel modules. Great!
Until I found out that Ubuntu had patc
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For the archs that both support, I don't see any advantage Debian has over Ubuntu.
KDE works properly. That's an advantage.
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See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian#Release_history [wikipedia.org]
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The wheezy installation I ran two weeks ago told me that I needed two binary non-free packages and asked if I wanted to load them from another device.
I didn't try it though because I installed via a wired network.
Re:Yay! debian! (Score:5, Informative)
The wheezy installation I ran two weeks ago told me that I needed two binary non-free packages and asked if I wanted to load them from another device.
I didn't try it though because I installed via a wired network.
It was probably related to Wireless hardware; the base Debian install these days ships only "free software", so by default you only get the package "firmware-linux-free" that contains firmware for 20 or so devices. Most of the firmware required to run Wireless cards are binary-only blobs that are considered "nonfree" in that you cannot see the source code for them, so that's why they're in the "non-free" section and don't come with the base install. [This is where Debian developers are purists, but I think it's for good reason.]
This can be frustrating if you're trying to do a network install over a Wireless card, which is why the option exists to load them from another device like a USB stick. Presumably you'd use another computer and download the necessary firmware and put it on a USB stick after finding it on http://packages.debian.org/ [debian.org] in the "Kernels" area.
Many happy returns, Debian! (Score:2)
Many happy returns, Debian!
The great thing about them is their willingness to port to all architectures - they are the sole surviving distro still supporting Itanium. The other great thing about them is that unlike the FSF, they are not fanatics - on one hand, they have a kFreeBSD project on, and on the other, a HURD project.
I do hope they get to a point soon where they offer their users a choice of Linux/kFreeBSD/Hurd, and in the long term, that they can mix and match GCC OR LLVM/Clang w/ any of these
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Thanks Debian! (Score:5, Interesting)
In 1998 my mother bought me a 'Linux' book with Red Hat 5.2 attached. Being a geek I installed it and loved it. I dabbled with upgrading it and using the Ximian beta Gnome 2. It always felt clunky though.
Then I discovered Debian. Not only did it have an AWESOME package manager, but it taught me about free software. It showed me that people can collaborate across the globe to make an integrated, high quality operating system for free. Around this time, I was finding my place in the world and I honestly think the spirit of Debian helped me discover Humanism and a concept of greater, moral good.
To this day I am in awe of this effort. Looking across its entire collection, the social structure and the individual elements (kernel, GNU toolchain, X, OpenSSH etc) I think free software is one of humanities greatest achievements. Whether you use it or not, take reflection in how awesome this completely free project is and how much it's brought us.
Thanks Debian!
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I was pretty convinced that your questions were rhetorical, but that "It's a hard sell" at the end made me unsure. Are you really asking?!
By it's very definition, Free Software is as much a "tool" for geeks as Free Speech is one for journalists.
It's a very useful basic principle. Not absolutely necessary, as we have countries without any appreciable Free Speech where still thousands of journalists make a living and produce myriads of stories, and we also have lots of software that doesn't classify as free-a
debian is good but can't access the internet (Score:2)
not meaning this to be inflammatory but I once installed debian on a computer to give it away, I put a good looking lxde desktop and quite some software (gimp, inkscape, audacity etc.). it was fast and good (a pentium 3 tower with 512MB ram).
only, the guy who took it just couldn't use his usb wifi adapter to pick up a network. I had installed wicd and a generic firmware collection (a package found with apt-cache search, but with little description of what these firmware were). sadly I didn't have the wifi i
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At the time he's talking about, all distros seemed to have that problem. I tried many CDs that I could get my hands on - Corel Linux, Storm Linux, TurboLinux, Caldera, and a couple of others that I forget. Installation for all of them was a breeze, but unfortunately, none of them would recognize my Ethernet NIC. This was way before Ubuntu though, and todays distros typically don't have a problem recognizing one's Realtek cards, but that's not how it was back then. And today, the problem is more of one's
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because I was the one installing it, doing all the choice of packages and all desktop environment configuration (autologin, taskbar, wallpaper) and the whole set up was identical to doing it with ubuntu 10.04. squeeze's firmware policy is the biggest difference. I know newbies installing debian the easy way too, it's identical to ubuntu for the most part. a buddy still has an installation of etch or lenny. my main fault was installing some stupid firmware collection and believing it has a 50% chance of work
In other news (Score:2)
1993 is currently 19 years ago.
Goodnight from Old Guy News Tonight!
Thank you Ian (Score:2)
Ian, thank you for starting such an excellent distribution.
Sorry it didn't work out with Deb.
19 years! (Score:2)
Happy to Share (Score:3)
Stay away from the website though (Score:2)
Even though I appreciate the effort that Debian has put forth and I'm a large Debian fan, for some reason their marketing machine (or their ads) requested the location of my device which I refuse for any random website.
Considering Switching (Score:2)
Someone talk me
The Universal Operating System (Score:5, Informative)
It can be used on servers, desktops and small systems like the Raspberry Pi.
It can be bleeding edge with its unstable and experimental repositories.
It can be rock solid with the stable repository.
It comes with a non-free repository just in case you need proprietary firmware or drivers.
But wait, Debian is also a good choice if you're like RMS and want to fully embrace freedom:
It doesn't install anything non-free unless you explicitely allow it (since version 6.0).
Debian is one of the most versatile operating systems.
Happy Birthday! (Score:2)
Happy Birthday!
one of the new! (Score:2)
less than two years after the (very buggy and poorly maintained) SLS is still *new*.
and it's still around. SLS soon was thrown on the scrap heap.
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underpowered computer surrogate
Somebody didn't get a degree in Computer Science...
Re:Debian (Score:5, Insightful)
Debian lasted at least 4 years longer than Ian and Deb.
It's still the good stuff. My god. A distro you could boot from a 3.5 installer, and have ftp'd the world onto a DEC Alpha Multia VX42. :-) That was in '95, so I was hauling over ISDN. It beat getting Slackware as 1.44 MB disk images off of bitnet/DELPHI at 14Kbps.
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Yes - in '95 the internet connection of my university was over ISDN. Slackware was available locally on the ftp server. Those were exciting days.
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That's some pretty good stuff.
Pretty good, indeed. I've used Debian on my servers since 1998, and I love it.
If that's what being a freetard means, then I'm proud to be one.
Re:Debian (Score:4, Informative)
When viewing this picture [futurist.se], zoomed out, one can easily see that Debian is by far the most successful parent distribution.
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Actually, no. They'll see a whole bunch of them - Red Hat/Fedora, SUSE, and a few others. And depending on where they are looking - like if they buy a book or magazine on Linux, chances are they'll get a CD or DVD that has any of the other random distros - PCLinuxOS, Mageia, Zorin, Vector, Tiny Core, Mandriva, et al. If someone gives it to them, who knows what else they'll get.
Problem is that for many of those for whom this may be the first user experience, they may not like it when they install that d
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Actually, no. They'll see a whole bunch of them - Red Hat/Fedora, SUSE, and a few others. And depending on where they are looking - like if they buy a book or magazine on Linux, chances are they'll get a CD or DVD that has any of the other random distros - PCLinuxOS, Mageia, Zorin, Vector, Tiny Core, Mandriva, et al. If someone gives it to them, who knows what else they'll get.
I know a lot of people who use Linux -- friends, colleagues, -- and I don't see a zoo of distros you are describing. The regular users (users-users), use Ubuntu, the more programming oriented people use Debian. I use Mint (only because I got tired of Unity crap), but I had to go an extra mile to learn about it.
I mean, I consider myself to be a Linux Enthusiast and I haven't heard of the half of the distros you listed there.
The situation is somewhat better w/ BSD - FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD. Any of the others, like DragonFly, PC-BSD, Bitrig, GhostBSD, et al more often than not fall under one of these (although DragonFly admittedly has become quite independent over time).
Did this help FreeBSD gain popularity?
Competition is a good thing, even for free prod
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Or slightly more abstractly, http://xkcd.com/1095/ [xkcd.com]
No sooner would two distros merge than reasons would be found to fork them back into two, or more.
It's a blessing and a curse.
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