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My bread and butter is Windows programming but I've been playing with various Slackware, Red Hat (and Pink Tie) distributions for some time...worked on UNIX systems for 5-6 years and I'd like to keep the skills somewhat alive.
Got some work ennui going on now and I've been thinking about playing with some different distributions at home, going back to my roots...which leads me to ask how you all chose Debian as your distribution of choice. The discussion of it in "In the Beginning was the Command Line" sounded great but are there things about Debian that really grab you? If Debian has unique features that are worth looking at I'll check it out; Ubuntu is also sounding kind of intruguing.
Thanks, Genghis
Got some work ennui going on now and I've been thinking about playing with some different distributions at home, going back to my roots...which leads me to ask how you all chose Debian as your distribution of choice. The discussion of it in "In the Beginning was the Command Line" sounded great but are there things about Debian that really grab you? If Debian has unique features that are worth looking at I'll check it out; Ubuntu is also sounding kind of intruguing.
Thanks, Genghis
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Re: Why Debian?
Fri, July 15, 2005 - 1:28 PMapt-get: Just makes package management and dependancy difficulties go away.
Every package is owned by a developer: Low package loads on individual contributers mean far less broken packages, individual responsibilty. This is a big reason why Debian shines, High package quality.
More software: Debian has a ridiculous amount of packaged software. The archive list is hyuge.
conf dirs: In the last couple years Debian configuration files for have begun to split into modular files contained in conf.d dirs. This makes modular admin of systems with local requirements a breeze.
Free: Debain distributed packages are free, Free and FREE. If you are using Debian you need not worry about your software suddenly running to licence issues or going away. You think this is a restriction at first, but its actually a HUGE freedom from proprietary crap. Dealing with what RedHat has become makes me want to shoot them (Go CentOS!).
Great community: I like them. Jillions of folks like myself that just want to help you with your stupid questions. Developers that answer mail personally when you file bug reports or patches.
The Debian Policy: The reason for all of the above.
Developer Friendly: Debian is still largely by and for developers and admins, despite community attempts to broaden the base. It is by far the best technicaly put together distro under the hood. The concerns of developers and admins are taken into account because that's who's doing it. This has made the Debian reg'lar user experience suffer a bit. There are few Debian specific GUI tools in comparison to other distros.
Ubuntu: All this and someone paying attention to UI and user level concerns. A match made in heaven. If you were going to start playing with Linux and were not a guru already I could not reccomend Ubuntu more. I might reccomend it even if you were. -
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Re: Why Debian?
Fri, July 15, 2005 - 11:45 PMYes, Debian for the Server, Ubuntu for the Desktop. That's a great combination.
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Re: Why Debian?
Tue, July 19, 2005 - 5:26 PMAJ said:
<<Every package is owned by a developer>>
I'm curious how this works with regard to general open source apps (shared ownership?) and how testing is handled for various processors prior to releasing.
Example:
I checked out the Debian "available/orphaned" project pages to see if there was something I could pick up and work on as a starter/contrubutor project. There were several boot loaders (which I don't have the background for, though I think that would be cool at some point) and ran across Figaro's Password Manager, which sounds interesting. This bug report exchange makes it sound like it's actually up for grabs, as there's a bug listed there about 10 months old:
bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi
1. So, it looks like this is the same source package listed here on SourceForge. If an app is listed both as a Debian project and on sourceforge, is it likely to be the same project?
2. bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi
That's a bug report that makes it sound as if the app I mentioned works correctly except there are UI controls not enabled on an amd64 processor system. Since I don't have one, there's no way I can check this or test it there if I did find an x86 issue and fix it. If I fixed this as a Debian project, would the right way to get it tested for other processor architectures be to post it solo on SourceForge and ask people to have at it?
Just trying to figure out how the whole contributor process works. Thanks!
Genghis -
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Re: Why Debian?
Tue, July 19, 2005 - 9:13 PMYes, the guy with the SF site is the fpm developer. The Debian maintainer takes his code, applies any Debian specific patches and packages it up for installation on Debian machines. The Debian Maintaner then fields bug reports from the Debian users and acts as an interface to the upstream developer.
Debian maintainers test architechures to the best of their resources before unleashing a package to Unstable (or Experimental). Obviously most maintainers don't have an Alpha, an iSeries and an HPPA sitting in their living room. The Debian build daemons report build errors and its left to the sturdy and brave users of the Unstable distribution to report bugs back to the maintainer. Sometimes a maintainer will have to put out a Call For Help if a bug requires experience or resources above the Maintainer's means.
With your queston about fpm on x86-64, I'd just post the package location to the debian-devel mailing list and ask somebody to play with it.
The best users include patches with their bug report. Otherwise maybe the maintainer will fix the package or patch the source code and forward the patches upstream to the developer. Particularly onerous bugs are often just forwarded upstream. The Debian Package Maintainer is mostly responsible for just the Debian Packaging and acting as the interface between the Debian Users and the upstream software developer.
If you've played with Debian a bit and you think maintaining a package would be fun, I'd reccomend reading a bunch of HOWTOs on Debian package building, downloading the source package you're interested in and building a better version and test it out a bit. Maybe make your own apt-get source for friends and other weirdos on the net. Annouce your package location on the debian-devel list or something. Then you can get some low traffic feedback from interested developers. Once you're pretty confident with making Debian packages, go here:
www.us.debian.org/devel/join/newmaint
and jump through a couple hoops and you get blessed as a maintainer and your package will be included in the Debian main archives and you get upload privleges and stuff.
Some people just keep their own Debian packages on their own websites and never try to get them included in main. This is most commonly done for a couple peices of still proprietary software that Debian would not accept anyway. Fabio's ATI drivers, or Christian's proprietray media codecs are good examples.
As far as boot loaders go, LiLo has mostly been replaced by grub. Everyone's pretty happy with grub. There is a grub2 in development (pupa) and even a Debian package for it, but the package notes indicate that you would have to be foolhardy or really serious about helping develop it to play with it at this point.
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Re: Why Debian?
Fri, December 1, 2006 - 8:16 AMI agree completely. If there is one thing that sets Debian head and shoulders above the rest of the Linux world, it's that one simple command.
I used to be a big Mandrake fan, but got tired of burning CDs of the latest upgrade and re-OSing my machine every few months. With Debian, the same process is three command lines:
user@machinename:~$ su
user@machinename:~$ apt-get update
user@machinename:~$ apt-get dist-upgrade
Every other distro should make whatever effort is necessary to integrate apt-get as soon as possible. If they did, there might be a reason to look at something other than Debian. Until then, not so much.
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Re: Why Debian?
Fri, November 17, 2006 - 3:52 AMI switched to Debian Linux 1,5 weeks ago.
I am a user and i really like it. Very user friendly.
One small problem.
I can not find my computer hardware data. -
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Re: Why Debian?
Fri, November 17, 2006 - 4:08 AMWhich data are you looking for? -
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Re: Why Debian?
Fri, November 17, 2006 - 4:35 AMHarddisk space.
Chip speed mhx/ghx
Internal memory -
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Re: Why Debian?
Fri, November 17, 2006 - 12:54 PMHarddisk space.
df -h
Chip speed mhx/ghx
cat /proc/cpuinfo
Internal memory
free -m
I suggest checking out O'Reilly Network's LinuxDevCenter and checking out this page;
www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/...ex.html
Look for the link to "Download the "Linux Quick Reference to Useful Commands" and keep that .pdf around for reference.
peas. -
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Re: Why Debian?
Fri, November 17, 2006 - 5:29 PM> Harddisk space.
> df -h
Or, if you want to see what a single directory tree is taking up:
du -sh . -
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Re: Why Debian?
Mon, November 20, 2006 - 3:26 AM"Yes, Debian for the Server, Ubuntu for the Desktop."
What is wrong with Debian direct on your desktop?
You need a fast modern internet connection.
It works good for me. -
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Unsu...
Re: Why Debian?
Mon, November 20, 2006 - 8:29 AM" What is wrong with Debian direct on your desktop? "
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Nothing at all...plus, you don't have to deal with the munged security model of K/Ubuntu.
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Re: Why Debian?
Mon, November 20, 2006 - 5:34 PM>> "Yes, Debian for the Server, Ubuntu for the Desktop."
> What is wrong with Debian direct on your desktop?
It's not "right vs wrong" but, Debian has a long test/release cycle - which is fine for servers, you really don't want them to break.
But for Desktop, users want the latest and greatest more often than not, so Ubuntu is intended as a "stabilized" version of Debian Unstable.
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Re: multi-arch
Mon, November 20, 2006 - 2:36 PMmy first exposure to linux was red hat at college, and it seemed intriguing - excellent software for the price of learning it!
one reason i chose debian gnu/linux for my home machine was its fantastic multi-architecture approach - almost as wide as netbsd (if it depends on some particular cpu feature to work, the code is probably wrong). it was the _only_ linux distribution i was able to install on my home computer (an esoteric/obsolete monstrosity) when i decided to make the switch to linux.
once i `got' apt-get, i decided to stay.
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Unsu...
Re: Why Debian?
Thu, November 30, 2006 - 7:11 PMNatural selection. When I first switched to Linux, I installed Fedora Core, Debian, and OpenBSD. BSD never worked right, Fedora was cranky. Debian, once I fine tuned it a bit using the helpful and abundant advice online, has been unbelievably stable and easy to update. Routinely I look at the "uptime" and find I've been running for months without a reboot (in the Winter, at least--I turn off when there's the deadly Florida thunderstorms in summer).
There are ways to run faster, certainly--I also built a Linux From Scratch system. But updating it was a royal pain compared to aptitude.
