[techtalk] newbie questions

[Beverly Guillermo]

On Wed, 13 Oct 1999, Laurel Fan wrote:

<snip> 
> 2) Debian is a group of volunteers, not a company, so it will always be
> serious about free software, and they spend their time working on the
> distro instead of marketing.  Each maintainer is also personally
> responsible for his/her packages.

Did you hear that VA Linux, O'Reilly, and SGI are preparing to package
Debian in the future to sell in Retail stores?  I haven't been to clear
about how the volunteers/maintainers feel about this move but it looks
pretty good for $19.95, you get Debian and the book Installing Debian/Gnu
Linux published by O'Reilly and tech support provided by VA.

I read this somewhere... I think it's on Slashdot.

> 3) Version upgrades are absolutely painless.  To upgrade from 2.0 to
> 2.1, all I had to do was "apt-get dist-upgrade" and then paste in a few
> commands from the upgrade release notes.

The one thing that I found very good with Debian.  The only problem is
that I like to know where I'm installing stuff. =)

<snip>
> 5) It sticks to the Unix philosophy more than some other distros.  It
> doesn't rely on flaky graphical configuration tools, the output of a
> program can be the input of a program, etc.

What about Slackware? ;)  I can't wait until version 7.0 comes out of
Slack.

> 7) Debian also distributes Hurd :)

I never met anyone outside of the business environment who uses HURD. =)

> Debian may not be for you if:
> 
> 1) You don't want to use the command line.

You can install a X server and window manager just as easily. =)

> 2) You want to use a lot of software that is considered non-free by Debian.

It may not be available on the Debian distribution disks but it doesn't
stop you from installing the software. =)

> 3) You don't want to have to learn about linux to use it.

Heh. =)  I like this one.

> 4) You don't want a packaging system.

Of course, you don't have to use it. =)


---------------------------------------------------------------
Beverly Guillermo                                   [[mezanin]]
bguill at home.com                 http://members.home.com/bguill/



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