Let me ask about Debian

Let me ask about Debian

Posted Sep 20, 2006 22:43 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333)
In reply to: Let me ask about Debian by felixfix
Parent article: My Gentoo odyssey (Linux.com)

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.

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