[Nottingham] Debian devotion [was: OE Reply Fixer]

[Robert Davies]

On Wednesday 05 March 2003 00:25, you wrote:
> Martin wrote:
> > I must confess that its taken three NLUG meetings for me to
> > stumble upon why Debian attracts the ferver amongst devotees that
> > it does. However, I'll be staying with Mandrake for a while longer
> > until the learning curve eases off a little.
>
> I tried Debian (3.0, I think) a few months ago - it wouldn't
> recognise my DAT drive or network card, so I reverted to either RH
> or Mandy, whichever had been the most recent Linux Format magazine
> freebie at the time.  The installation procedure had already given
> a fairly poor impression in any case - it seemed crude and
> error-prone.
>
> So I'd be interested to hear why Debian devotees are so fond of it
> - is it the pure no-profit motive or something inherent to the
> actual product?  If it's the latter, what does it give you that
> you can't get from Mandrake, RH or Suse (say)?

I tried Debian a few years back at Potatoe release.  I liked the 
installation, ok it was text based, but it gave me full control and I could 
actually build the filesystems using the options on blocksize, and inode 
tweaks etc

To get things configured right, it's best to back up your /etc, and crib 
settings from a working Mandrake, RedHat or SuSE installation, saves a lot of 
searching round on net and RTFM-ing.

For dialup you have the problem that there are a lot of binary patches to 
download, even running the stable release, I found it was connecting to do 
that far too much of the time and taking too long.

What Debian has, is :

Good solid, well tessted, stable and reliable (stable version)

Puts you in control, it's all open and there's nothing hidden or glossed over

Consistent layout of packages, most things are done 'right' by volunteers.  
The packaging system is good, you can install software and have dependancies 
satisfied easily at the command line.

There is a lot of software available pre-packaged.

It is easy to install minimal system, then add what you want, rather than 
have almost 1GB  of 'bloat', on first installation.

Against is :

i386 packages - Commercial distros are generally compiling for i586 (with 
some i686 rpm available for C library, and prepared athlon kernels etc.)

Stable release - Does not get optional software updates.  When they made 
Mozilla available, alot of anally retentive types complained on the lists, 
about how stable was meant to be stable, and even though they were only being 
offered the chance to install Mozilla, made such a fuss that it was declared, 
no new packages would be made available in stable.

The situation may have improved now with the addition of a permanent 
'Testing', which is a less bleeding edge version of 'Unstable'.

They are GNOME leaning, and KDE is second fiddle meaning newer KDE versions, 
take a while to be available.


So I dropped Debian and RedHat and used SuSE, which gave me a solid, fast and 
reliable system, with Fresh software, but not right on the bleeding edge.

Now I have a 1Mb/s I plan to play with Gentoo on a spare machine, which is 
source based, with a BSD-style Portage system.  For dialup, surely 
downloading source patches and applying then re-compiling, linking and 
installing automatically, will be the fastest way.  Even if some programs are 
statically linked, and will need re-linking (and re-compile to generate the 
.o's), your system is likely to be quicker to re-build, and trivial packaging 
changes don't cause re-download of all the binaries.

Rob