Debian 3.0 CDRs

Matthew Hawkins matt at mh.dropbear.id.au
Thu Aug 8 17:36:36 EST 2002


Alfred (alfred at mazuma.net.au) wrote:
> At the risk of being flamed I would like to add a con to using Debian. 
> When I installed it (eventually, the boot disks kepts segfaulting during 
> install...) it was a bare system. To get Xfree 4.0 (for GL support) and 
> KDE 2.2 to run was a major exercise, with lots of hacking of apt config 
> files to make it work. In the end I gave up and reinstalled Mandrake...

I used to be a distribution junkie.  I loved Linux so much I wanted to
experience as much of it as possible.  It's fun & useful to see how
different people configure their Unix environments, and running a
different Linux distribution is an easy means of doing that.

So anyway, I'd been a happy Redhat user since 2.1, was running 4.x
(can't remember exactly, was the latest at the time) and decided, since I
had an Infomagic CD handy, to try Debian (then at 1.3 - Bo) instead when
I decided to reinstall to clear cruft of a zillion redhat upgrades and
accumulated useless junk.

Well, after getting the hang of dselect, do you think it would let me
install XFree86 at all?  Hell no.  It turned out to be a corrupted CD (I
learned later from a reliable source) but still, all work and no XFree86
makes Matt a dull boy ;)  I was using Emacs/VM or perhaps Exmh for email
at the time, so XFree86 was a necessity, aside from plain UI niceness of
it.  So back to Redhat it was...

Thankfully after Redhat *really* pissed me off, I'll only repeat that
story offline, I got a good set of Debian CD's off Stephen Rothwell way
back in his NEC days :) and I am eternally grateful to him for that.
That was 2.0, and the only time I've touched Redhat since was before I
managed to convince former coworkers that they were spending far too
much time dealing with Redhat-induced problems and not enough time
getting work done, they should run Debian instead.  Now two of those are
maintainers...

> When it comes to dependancies I like the FreeBSD ports system. "cd" into 
> the package you want and type "make", works like a charm every time :)

The FreeBSD ports system is brilliant, and Gentoo Linux tries to
duplicate it.  I'd like to try that distribution one day.

Mind you, it's not necessarily "every time" :P  But it's so easy to fix
when it does break - you're usually not dependent on upstream to fix
breakages.  And it's easy to extend.  Take the vim port for instance,
a particular favourite of mine, took me 15 minutes including test
compiles to give that the options to build with all the GUI options and
all the scripting language options that you decided to choose to
include.  Accepted upstream.  And its still far easier for me to build
Vim on FreeBSD than to get the same setup I want from Debian.  I've been
talking to Debian bigwigs about that...

-- 
Matt
"So, logically, if she weighs the same as a duck, she's made of wood, and therefore a witch!"
(Monty Python and the Holy Grail)
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