Let me ask about Debian [LWN.net]

Let me ask about Debian

Posted Sep 20, 2006 3:10 UTC (Wed) by felixfix (subscriber, #242)
In reply to: Adventures are pretty personal by drag
Parent article: My Gentoo odyssey (Linux.com)

I tried Debian many years ago and was horrified at the install. My memory is having to individually select thousands of packages.

Plus it seems to be way out of date, frommemories and judging from the jokes about how ancient Debian is, preferring stability at such a premium that it seems to take forever to get any current packages. Of course there are the unstable branches ..

So, can you Debian folks comment on those aspects? How much of a pain is it to use the unstable branch, and how much of a pain to install from scratch?

On another topic, two things I like about gentoo are being able to configure packages that I want, such as choosing KDE and no Gnome, etc, the USE flags. I am not talking about fussing with complier flags here, but package flags, so you get just the combination of features you want. If I want emacs without a GUI, it's easy enough, and so on.

The second feature I like is not having to ever reinstall from scratch when new releases came out. Even if the compiler changes, or the glibc major version, I may have to recompile everything, but I don't have to reinstall from scratch and merge my config changes back into the new install. How does Debian handle this?

Lastly, how does the Debian 64 bit release compare to the 32 bit release? I know a few packages are 32 bit only, like OpenOffice and firefox, but is everything done in parallel for the most part?

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Let me ask about Debian

Posted Sep 20, 2006 6:14 UTC (Wed) by amacater (subscriber, #790) [Link]

Last point first: AMD64 wasn't (quite) released as Debian 3.1 but released
about a fortnight later: it therefore isn't in the main archives as Debian
3.1. 64 bit only, though with the option of 32 bit compatibility libraries.
Will be released as a full architecture with Debian 4.0 [Currently Debian
Etch/testing]. Rocks :) Has almost as many packages as the 32 bit Debian.
Missing: OpenOffice.org, 32 bit only video codecs and "stuff", some Firefox
plugins? Ncurses install, though now with the option of a GTK gui. Running
it here on 2 machines (one testing, one unstable). The name is a slight
misnomer - it will run happily on Intel EM64T with no modification.
Installing <random package from source> from scratch - eminently possible,
but probably unnecessary for the most part. [Someone asked me once about
scapy - a packet mungeing tool - and I watched the chaos of a Gentoo
install which needed large amounts compiled, libraries updated - took about
half a morning to get a half working package. On a Debian testing box, I
just did "apt-get install scapy" - and it worked.]

Let me ask about Debian

Posted Sep 20, 2006 8:40 UTC (Wed) by tyhik (subscriber, #14747) [Link]

I have used debian for many years and about last 4 years, I have used only unstable on my development boxes and at home. The unstable branch has been really stable for me. During these 4 years, there have been about 6-7 incidents, when I have noticed something broken. I have hit the package dependency problems a few times, a few times got crashing firefox and once got emacs which did not color file content correctly. Dependency problems needed tweaking, but in general the next day the problems were fixed. I usually upgrade once a month and avoid upgrading in the middle of busy times.

Now, I probably run just a narrow set of software on my boxes, needed for c/c++ development. Also, I have always compiled my kernels myself, so I cannot comment on debian kernels.

Let me ask about Debian

Posted Sep 20, 2006 9:53 UTC (Wed) by debacle (subscriber, #7114) [Link]

Hello felixfix,

as a Debian developer, I have to agree: A few years back, the installation process was really difficult to handle and the package selection mechanism was sometimes painful. Since version 3.1 (codename "sarge") there is a completely new installer ("d-i" = Debian installer), that does automatic hardware detection and features "tasksel", a task selection mechanism, where you just select zero or more package groups like "Web server", "Desktop system" etc.

Second thing: Out of date software. Again, I have to agree, that this was a problem with Debian. We got better, I believe: We try to do official ("stable") releases more frequently than before (next release 4.0 "etch" planned 2006-12-04, IIRC) and if stable is too old for you, you have two options: Either use the "testing" distribution (or even "unstable", if you are courageous), or use only selected new software from backports.org.

In your case, I strongly recommend to download the Debian installer CD from http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/News/2006/20... and just give it a try.

Debian does not support an equivalent to Gentoo USE flags, sorry. If you like KDE, just install it and remove GNOME. I installed XFCE and removed both GNOME and KDE.

About reinstallation on major upgrades: IMHO, this never has been an issue with Debian. You always could do smooth upgrades, even on major library or compiler or kernel changes.

Debian amd64 is a pure 64 bit port. Currently, only 64 bit programs are supported, i.e. neither openoffice nor wine. Firefox runs fine on amd64. You can install openoffice, wine or proprietary software in a chroot environment and still run it from outside via symlinks.

Let me ask about Debian

Posted Sep 20, 2006 22:43 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

Debian stable only realy suffered from big lags in software.

This was fine for server, but sucked for Desktop.

You use Debian Unstable if you want stuff up to date. Debian Testing is a bit less churn then unstable and usually you'll not get the odd package that breaks things in Unstable.

You use Debian Stable for production systems. Stuff you want to set and forget or 'just work'.

With Debian Etch hopefully getting released on time this will be a huge breakthrough for Debian. It will not only benifit Debian, but the whole host of popular distros that base themselves off of Debian. (Ubuntu, Mepis, Linspire, Xandros, etc etc).

As a whole this will lift up Linux-based systems. Debian and the work they do is simply incredable when it comes to unifing and stabilising software for Linux systems.

Nowadays when using Debian Unstable your software is more up to date then what you can find in Ubuntu or Fedora unless either distro did a new release that month. It updates continiously vs 6 month release cycle.

If you want to compile optimized packages it's not that difficult. It's not super automated like with Gentoo, but the package management system does support downloading source packages and recompiling them. You'll quickly find that it's pretty pointless except for very specific programs and libraries.

If you haven't tried Debian for a long time then I suggest installing Debian Testing. It's very nice.

For deploying stuff like large numbers of desktops Debian Stable would be my first choice. When you get down into it Debian IS the most complete system that I know of. Seriously. It's got a lot of corner cases cornered. If you want to use a newer Desktop then Debian Stable offers, but you don't want to upgrade your system or half your system to Debian Testing there is backports that recompile testing packages for Debian Stable.

With pinning and recompiling packages it's possible to backport the odd package from Debian testing or unstable to Stable without having to upgrade a bunch of libraries and other stuff. I recompiled OpenAFS from testing to run on stable since the openafs project made big improvements since Debian Stable was released.

For server usage it's pretty good. Setup a Gentoo box and a CentOS box and a Debian Stable (or Debian Testing if you want newer stuff) box next to one another and setup a rather complex website using Drupal or something like that. Something that uses most of the 'LAMP' stack or whatnot. (for debian stable you'd just go "apt-get install drupal" ) Let them run for a for a few months keeping up with the latest security updates and such and you'll probably find that out of the boxes the Debian Stable system would be the box that required the least amount of effort in maintaining.

One of the troublesome things with Debian is how they change packages around to fit. Sometimes changing configuration files locations or moving stuff to /var which would be in /usr by default and stuff like that.

To combat this you'll find every package and command has a 'man' file. It's a bug if it's not there. Also debian changelogs, documentation provided by the upstream source tarball, and other things such as sometimes configuration samples end up in /usr/share/doc/<packagename>. I've found this very usefull. Especially for things were upstream doc is a bit vage on configuration files such as mplayer.

Google for 'Debian Desktop Survival Guide'. I've found that very usefull.

The stuff for Debian Testing is at:
http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/

I suggest the Netinst image. If you have lots of machines or want to try different installs setup apt-proxy on a machine and you'll cache the packages so that you can do reinstalls or multiple unique installs faster. Skim through the installation guide also. There is a lot of good information there.

Personally I like to try out new stuff time to time. Gentoo is still interesting and especially Fedora Core is nice to look at. They have some fancy stuff with things like Stateless linux and those clustering features are very interesting. For some reason though Debian testing seems much faster then Fedora Core even though they are using about the same stuff... but maybe it's just me. It's tough sometimes.