[Techtalk] Question on distro.... LONG

[David Merrill]

On Wed, Feb 27, 2002 at 12:27:14PM +0000, hobbit at aloss.ukuu.org.uk wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 26, 2002 at 12:55:18AM -0500 or thereabouts, Terri Oda wrote:
> > And if you haven't seen the Debian install, let me warn you, it was like 
> > stepping back in time for me -- much more primitive than Redhat's, 
> > anyhow.  Still, as long as you've got all the info for your machine it 
> > shouldn't be a problem.  And, in fact, perhaps your machine is old enough 
> 
> I'll second that. However, I had heard so much about Debian's installer
> that I was prepared for it. And I took the time to read the (excellent)
> docs on the install and to read the dselect tutorial. And when I got 
> tired, I simply left it sitting at a prompt and came back the next
> day, fresh and ready to go. It was much less of a problem than the 
> horror stories had made out, because I somehow didn't get into the 
> dselect tangle that seems to catch most people.

Here are some random and meandering comments on Debian and what you
can expect if you install it and run it. I hope it's helpful, although
as I write this preface I realize how much I jumped around. Sorry for
being incoherent possibly, but hopefully these meanderings will give
some insight into Debian in real world use. :-)

I found Debian's installer to be hard if you don't do the homework
first, and really easy if you do. As long as you know your hardware
and can identify it for Debian, everything else is very
straightforward.

I hate dselect and never use it. There are a few other front-ends,
including gnome-apt (alpha, but works for me, just a front end to
apt-get and dpkg).

Rightly famous for apt-get, Debian is also imho the easiest to do a
minimal install on and then upgrade as you need to. You're only
seconds away from having a missing program installed (well, on my DSL
line anyway). Believe me, any frustrations you experience during
install are well compensated by the lack of a need to ever reinstall
and the ease of maintenance. Want to make sure you've applied all
security patches? Just run apt-get and you'll get them as soon as they
are available. Can't get any easier than that.

Some people running stable (not as safe on others) automatically run
apt-get in a cron job, for an almost zero-maintenance machine.

Other distros offer similar functionality sometimes, but none as
comprehensive as Debian afaik.

Among them, Conectiva offers apt-get for rpm (apt-get is the delivery
mechanism basically, not the package format itself which is dpkg).
Doubtless the other distros are working on the same thing.

Red Hat has the "Red Hat Network" (I think that's what it's called)
where you can do the same basic thing. I believe they offer "premium"
downloading for a small fee. I had problems with it but that could
have been an anomaly. The package that does this is called up2date
iirc.

One more tip. If you want to upgrade to testing or unstable, start
with a minimal install, upgrade, then add packages. Less potential for
breakage that way, which is possible when doing major upgrades. Also,
manually upgrade apt-get, dpkg, and modutils (anything else I'm missing?)
before anything else. Theoretically it shouldn't matter because all
dependencies should be noted in the packages, but errors do happen
rarely, especially in unstable. Update the key package management
programs first so you'll have the right tools to handle the other new
packages. I've seen a few packages not correctly identify that they
needed a new dpkg, and it took me a bit to figure out how to fix it.

irc.debian.org is a great place for help and folks have been kind and
helpful to me when I asked for help. Many channels devoted to specific
topics related to Debian. Also read Debian Planet and subscribe to the
Debian Weekly News. The Debian user list and help list are VERY high
traffic so I don't follow them, just file them for searching later
on.

Be sure to use packages.debian.org to look up software you might want,
and bugs.debian.org if you have a problem, to see if there's a bug
report filed already. Often there will be a workaround posted. Do this
before you put lots of time into debugging a problem only to find out
it's not something you're doing. I learned *this* one the hard way.

When I did my workstation install, the number of bugs fixed in
unstable meant it was really more usable than the stable. This was
when Gnome and KDE were a whole version (going on 2 versions now) ago,
and lots of bugs were being fixed daily in preparation for their next
big releases. I don't think this is the case anymore, but it depends
what programs you run.

Over the past year I've been running Debian, my install has broken
twice. Once X wouldn't load, another time my KDE broke. Gnome has
always worked flawlessly, but the Gnome is rather outdated since Ximian
Gnome is not supported on unstable. Ximian Gnome is such a big
improvement on generic Gnome I consider that being "outdated".

Mozilla/Galeon also tend to not always get updated in sync when a new
Moz comes out. I wait at least 2 weeks after a Moz release to update it,
and by then all is well.

XFree86 4.2 is going to come into unstable in the next few weeks,
which is a good example of how Debian *unstable* is arguably the most
cutting-edge distribution. Maybe Slack too? Usually unstable gets stuff
some months before the other distros do.

Upgrading to testing or unstable is a big deal, but almost always
works flawlessly, especially on a base install. It will also update your
glibc iirc, which is another *big* update. Might want to do that one
manually too before the other apps.

When doing your "big" update, you can do "apt-get install foo" instead
of "apt-get upgrade -uf" to upgrade packages in the order you wish
them to be updated.

I installed my server by doing the minimal install, then upgrading to
testing (which is actually very stable), then adding servers I needed
as I needed them. My testing server has never had any problems at all.
Some people claim testing is just as stable as the other distros'
releases. I'm just one data point, but it has been like a rock for me.

Debian is one of the worst when it comes to having stuff just work out
of the box. Most things do, yes, in fact the vast majority. But a few
things you have to do yourself that other distros tend to help you
with, like configuration. In my experience, SuSE is the best
integrated and fully featured out of the box, compared to Red Hat (the
only other Distro I've run). It is a truly sweet piece of engineering
and deserves its many awards. Red Hat is also very high quality, but
somewhere between Debian and SuSE (and Mandrake, I understand) wrt
desktop polish. But as their executives have said in interviews, they
are not going for the desktop market which they think Linux isn't
ready for yet.

OTOH, Debian sometimes has scripts that will download and install even
nonfree software and other miscellaneous stuff. For instance, one of
the things you want if you run X on your box is the Microsoft TrueType
font pack. You can download a Debian package (msttcorefonts) which is
not really a software package per se, but a script that downloads the
"Free" (gratis) MS web fonts (Verdana, etc.) and installs them in X
for you. That's a good package to have if you want web sites to render
as the designer sometimes intended them to be. Despite my, shall we
say, lack of esteem for Microsoft, their web fonts are very high
quality and optimized for screen display and legibility.

Enough rambling. Feel free to ask questions if you want more info or
help. I'd be glad to offer personal help if you like on the Debian
install/configure process. Who says Linux doesn't offer technical
support? And I won't charge you a fortune, by the hour, or put you on
hold. I promise. :-)

> Another caveat about Debian installs: don't leave it to install over
> a metered pay-per-minute network connection overnight and come back 
> the next morning expecting to see it done. As each package arrives, 
> you are asked to configure it (it has helpful suggestions on defaults). 
> A friend said his brother got to this stage, went to bed, and found it 
> sitting there, with the modem still on, the next morning, waiting for 
> his choices for one of the very first packages. We don't generally have 
> flat rate connections here, and this made a big dent in the phone bill. 

There is an option you can pass to apt-get to tell it do only download
the packages, "--download-only". But that won't hang up your modem, so
if you're on a metered line it won't help.

-- 
David C. Merrill                         http://www.lupercalia.net
Linux Documentation Project                   david at lupercalia.net
Collection Editor & Coordinator            http://www.linuxdoc.org

Thus spoke St. Alia-of-the-Knife: "The Reverend Mother must combine the
seductive wiles of a courtesan with the untouchable majesty of a virgin
goddess, holding these attributes in tension so long as the powers of her
youth endure. For when youth and beauty have gone, she will find that the
place-between, once occupied by tension, has become a wellspring of
cunning and resourcefulness."
	-- from "Muad'Dib, Family Commentaries" by the Princess Irulan