Re: How would I get debian unstable?
On Thu, Jun 05, 2008 at 02:51:02PM +0100, annne annnie wrote:
> Hi, I'm the one who asked about getting unstable and the different
> distributions compared to debian. I have a few more questions, sorry.
> First question: How would I reply correctly so that my reply is still
> in the same topic? Someone mentioned something about apt-get upgrade
> causing locked packages that won't get upgraded or something... thats
> the kind of stuff I want to learn. How would I learn about how debian
> works and how to configure it all? All I have been doing so far is
> just googling the problems I have run into, but I'm not really
> learning anything. Also, when you guys say SUSe do you mean openSuSE?
> Because I would like to try it out, but the only one I could find out
> how to download was openSuSE. Last question(s), is there a unix one I
> could get for free? Are they similar to linux? What are the
> differences?
First, wrap your lines at 72 chars. The best (according to consensus on
this list) is for replies to be interspursed with questions. That's
very difficult if you ask several questions in one paragraph.
1. It depends on your email client. In mutt, I hit L for
list-reply.
2. Your best bet, assuming it will boot on your computer (i.e. your
computer isn't too new) is to start with stable and learn the system.
Read the documentation on the debian website, including the debian
policy manual, the debian-reference, and the whole debian installation
manual.
Last question re Unix vs Linux:
Do you know the difference between Unix and Linux? Short answer is that
Linux wrote Linux when he needed a Unix but Unix was caught in the Unix
wars and there wasn't one available that wasn't tied up in legal
wrangling and rewriting to remove copywritten code. That all ended up
being fixed and the non-commercial unix-like OSs (brand-name UNIX is a
brand name that costs money) are all based on the Berkley Software
Distribution (BSD). There are three different BSD flavours with
different targets: FreeBSD focuses on high-performance users and is
closest to Debian as far as working on new hardware with good
multi-processor support, etc, with the downside that it is large and is
hard to put on embedded devices and only targets main-stream server
hardware. NetBSD works well on most systems and supports a wide-range
of hardware types but security updates take a while to show up compared
to other distros. OpenBSD works well on most systems and doesn't do
anything that can compromise security; it is religious in its licensing
issues and doesn't allow any non-free stuff and only limited gpl stuff
in the base system (and no kernel modules) but does have lots of
packages available. Of the BSDs, the only downside I've found to
OpenBSD is if you want high-performance video (e.g. you need the speed
of nVidia's kernel module) you may not get it since you are limited to
the drivers that come with xorg. OTOH, OpenBSD's documentation is
first-rate but the list posters are not tolerant of people asking
questions who haven't read all the docs and googled for themselves
first.
If your goal is to learn how to run Unix and are willing to read, I'd
actually suggest OpenBSD over Debian since Debian does so much for you
out-of-the-box. You can read OpenBSD's docs at www.openbsd.org. If you
are serious about it there is one dedicated OpenBSD book: Abolute
OpenBSD and for you would be a must-read. Once current downside to
OpenBSD due to limited resources is that right now there are no security
updates (backports) to older versions of packages. For example, if you
have firefox and there's a security fix, you will need to update the
whole system then update your source for firefox and had everything
rebuild (due to new library dependancies). There are tools to automate
it but nothing out there is as easy as Debian's apt.
Of course, if your learning computer is not directly connected to the
internet and contains no private data, just learn and don't worry about
updating it.
Just my 2c worth. I hope my comparisons were not offensive to the
respective projects as none was intended. There are several pages
comparing the BSDs and Linuxs on wikipedia.org.
Doug.
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