Re: Re: newby trying to go debian
Użytkownik Micha <codejodler@gmx.ch> napisał:
>(Tomek,
>After finishing this mail it occurs to me that you can easily cause confusion
>throwing the word 'official' upon some different things without explanation.
>I believe a newbie would need some clarification, but i'm not going to make
>my reply even longer)
>
Ok, so here is some clarification;)
When I wrote about an official programs I meant binaries released
by their official vendors.
Eg. Official OpenOffice is the one that you can download form
OpenOffice.org site. There are no 64bit precompiled versions available on
the website, so there is no official 64bit OpenOffice.
However, since this is an Open Source software, everyone can download
it's source and compile it. Thanks to that we have so called unofficial builds
made by the community (eg., among other, the AMD64 version packaged
for Debian by Gudjon -
http://mc2-m038.mc2.chalmers.se/%7Egudjon/debian/amd64/)
There is a familiar situation with Firefox - you cannot find an 64bit compiled
version on the mozilla.org, but there are builds made by the community.
As for Flash Player and Acrobat Reader, these programs are not Open
Source software and there are not even unofficial builds for any architecture
that is not 'officially supported' by Adobe.
There are only some other versions of flash written by third parties, thus
they lack some functionality of the 'official' software.
And the java plugin.
Because of the lack of the 'official' 64bit Firefox the Sun Microsystems
does not include a java plugin in their JRE in 64bit version.
JRE is also closed source software, so the situation is similar to that in case
of flash.
However, as far as I know, Sun is planning to open the JRE's source code
and the situation with the 64bit java plugin for web browsers will change
then.
I hope my explanation on the officiality of the software in the Linux world
is clear enough;)
And BTW. Someone (in the reply to Rodrigo) mentioned Ubuntu.
I think also it is a good idea to start with Linux, although if one
thiks that chroot is to much for him at the beginning then maby it is
better to start with a distro that lets running 32bit software directly.
To be honest my first Linux distro was Mandrake (32bit). Then I switched
to 64bit Fedora (which let's running 32bit apps w/o chroot, as SuSE does).
Now I use Debian and in my opinion this is the best Linux distribution I've
ever used, although if I haven't begun wiht the other ones it would be
much more difficult for me to learn Linux.
Tomek
>On first glance, Debian doesn't seem to be the ideal Linux distribution for
>multimedia, which is a heavily licensed/patented area, through it's rather
>restricting policy which demands strongly for freedom. Nonetheless, Debian
>includes (but marks) so called non-free packages. And it is possible, in most
>cases, to get some bloody-edge or 'dirty' packages from an 'unofficial' repository
>(not from debian), and install without problems.
>
>Please note that the mentioned 64bit problems are not Debian specific,
>all Distributions face them and generally they are rather architecture-specific,
>windows had (or still has) them too. It always needs some time to adapt to
>such a major change, but the problems will be solved in some moths
>(i hope).
>
>For multimedia work, it's probably best to instrall one of the official
>non-released 'beta' versions, namely 'unstable' or sid, which isn't that
>unstable at all (it runs on all my machines) it's just not stable as rock,
>compared to the official debian releases used to be. It's not recommended
>for real servers, for example. 'stable', however, is not fully up-to-date with
>codecs and features because it got 'frozen' at some point (no new features).
>I think you will understand the idea.
>
>SuSE has somewhat more familiarity and support for newbies moving
>from windows, so maybe no bad choice. But Debian supports more ways
>to modify and adapt the system, getting the best out of your hardware; and
>it's package management system is probably the best (though there might be
>human failures as everywhere).
>I would start with a SuSE, to get used to the basics, and if you find Linux is ok
>for you, switch to Debian unstable ASAP.
>It's worth the additional learning effort.
>
>micha
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