[Gllug] What's so good about Debian?

[Richard Jones]

Debian has a very steep learning curve. Indeed the installation
process is rumoured to be so complex and unfriendly to keep the oiks
out (this could be an urban myth!). But once you get it installed:

* Apt and dpkg are a great packaging system. It's really very well
  thought out. It also does proper dependency analysis, which is a big
  win over Red Hat < Fedora.

* Apt contains every possible package you're ever likely to use, so you
  will rarely if ever need to install from source.

* The Debian policy means that all applications work the same. eg. They
  all have their installation files under /etc/<appname> and they all
  put their user binaries in /usr/bin and so on. This is much cleaner
  and also means you don't need to go searching for a configuration file,
  log file or documentation.

* Same stuff works on my i386 and Sparc boxen, because Debian doesn't
  favour one architecture over any other.

* I can put 'stable' on my servers for peace of mind, and have the
  excitement of 'testing' or 'unstable' on my desktop machines. There
  are three branches of Debian: stable, which is old, but tracks
  all security fixes, so it "just works"; testing, which is new stuff;
  unstable, which is stuff which hasn't been widely used or tested, and
  so might break things.

* You'll never have to reinstall again, because you can keep tracking
  stable/testing.

Tip for easier installation: Spend a few quid and buy some CDs from
the Linux Emporium.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones. http://www.annexia.org/ http://freshmeat.net/users/rwmj
Merjis Ltd. http://www.merjis.com/ - all your business data are belong to you.
PTHRLIB is a library for writing small, efficient and fast servers in C.
HTTP, CGI, DBI, lightweight threads: http://www.annexia.org/freeware/pthrlib/

-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at linux.co.uk
http://list.ftech.net/mailman/listinfo/gllug