Let me ask about Debian

Let me ask about Debian

Posted Sep 20, 2006 9:53 UTC (Wed) by debacle (subscriber, #7114)
In reply to: Let me ask about Debian by felixfix
Parent article: My Gentoo odyssey (Linux.com)

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Second thing: Out of date software.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.

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