[clug] Debian any good?

[Rob Weir]

On Thu, Nov 20, 2003 at 10:06:02PM +1100, Brad Hards said
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> Yeah, only joking. I know its got community support, I know its supposed to be 
> easy to maintain (even if I'm 100 times more familiar with RPM), and I'm 
> willing to give it a go on my new scratchbox (AMD2400, 1Gig RAM)
> 
> But my last attempt at Debian (on a iMac) was a dismal failure. It was so bad 
> I went back to OS X. 

Eh?  It didn't work at all?  It's not the prettiest thing in the world,
but it will install on almost anything.  Try asking for help on the
#debianppc IRC channel on freenode or on the debian-powerpc mailing list
if you give it a go again,

> Two real issues:
> 
> 1. Has the installer for Debian progressed beyond boot-floppies yet? What is 
> the right magic download to get something that I might be able to make work?

Woody (aka stable) uses boot-floppies, yes.  The next stable (sarge)
uses a new system called "debian-installer" and you can get the latest
snapshots here: http://gluck.debian.org/cdimage/testing/netinst/.  Note
that you will NOT be able to install stable with these images, only
testing.

> 2. Is there some guide on doing parallel development without screwing the 
> dependency system? For example, if I'm working on KDE, can Debian handle 
> the .deb versions in conjunction with some stuff compiled from source?

Policy requires that packages never touch user stuff in /usr/local/ and
/opt isn't even created in the default install.  Install KDE to there
and dpkg/apt will promise not to care.  Of course, you won't be able to
easily install things from Debian itself which depend on the KDE
packages, but such is subverting the package system.  There is "equivs"
if you really want to get down and dirty.

-- 
Rob Weir <rweir at ertius.org> | mlspam at ertius.org  |  Do I look like I want a CC?
Words of the day:        SRI clandestine UNSCOM high security Pakistan Albright
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