[Klug-general] Debian 4.0 released

[Allen Brooker]

Mark Brier (Lists) wrote:
> Allen Brooker wrote:
>> Dan Attwood wrote:
>>> The choice for debian is want you want to run it on. ie;
>>>
>>> athlon, athlon64, pentium, sparc, mips, arm, toaster, casio
>>> calculator, fusion powered super computer, dead badger, my mates daves
>>> spectrum, the 486 i use as a doorstop
>>>
>>> Seriously though I don't think you should knock debian to hard, sure
>>> they have problems but at least they make a good base for other
>>> distros to do it right
>> Sorry, but in my opinion Gentoo beats them severely on both points. Hey,
>> how many distro's can run on a PS3? And creating a new distro based on
>> Gentoo can be as simple as creatign an overlay and continuing to use the
>> main Gentoo package repository and mirrors for the msot part - Sabayon
>> does this and is apparently the favoured distro of the Beryl developers.
> 
> Please remember that neither Gentoo nor Ubuntu would exist without
> Debian, from which they are both derived.
> 
> Also, whilst gentoo is an excellent distro for both learning and
> building custom servers, what does it add for the "non-tinkerer" (i.e.
> those of us who want to build a server and have it server)? nothing,
> except an extra days work to install.
> 
> As for overlays etc. the same can be achieved using debian repositories too.
> 
> There are a number of distros that can run on ps3 from what i can gather
> , however I think only debian runs on the nokia 770 internet tablet.
> 
> M
> 
How on earth did you work that one out? The closest thing Gentoo is 
related to is the BSD ports system. Gentoo has absolutely nothing 
debian-like in it in my opinion.

With regards to the Nokia 770, Gentoo runs on it. One of the beautiful 
things about Gentoo's setup is if you can get the kernel to run on it 
and a compiler to compile for it, then you can run Gentoo on it. And 
Gentoo has all the tools for cross-compiling, distcc, etc.

For the "non-tinkerer", Gentoo gives a huge range of choice in the 
available applications and much reduced hassle in terms of only having 
the packages you want installed. It also offers a package management 
system that will not automatically overwrite any configuration files but 
allows you to manage the changes in a sensible way that I've not been 
able to find on any other distro.

With regards to time spent, I currently run a Debian server but am 
switching to Gentoo for a number of reasons, (including, but not limited 
to, ease of installing newer versions of software than are available in 
the repositories, not having the damn thing ever overwrite my config 
files and range of software available as packages that I can trust 
easily (Gentoo's package system allows me to see exactly where the 
source files are coming from and exactly what patches are applied)) but 
basically I've spent less time overall setting up the Gentoo server than 
it took me to set up the Debian server (for the record, when I set up 
the Debian server I was using Debian as my desktop distro, and I'm now 
using Gentoo as my desktop distro, so experiance with the distro isn't 
much of a factor).

Compile time for the server won't be a factor as, like I currently do 
for my Debian server, I'll be running a local copy on a Xen setup for 
testing changes. I can then take binary packages created on my local 
setup and install them on my server (and Gentoo's binary package system 
has this great feature which means that all the config files get 
packaged up too, so I don't need to reconfigure anything when I install 
it on the actual server).