Re: Future of Debian uncertain?
On Tue, 25 Feb 2003, Alfredo Valles wrote:
>
> 1-The installation process almost always misses to recognize sound cards
> and network. But ironically, Debian CDs include Kudzu, which have always
> worked fine for me detecting and configuring these devices once you have
> manually installed it with dselect. Isn't that dumb?
> Now that there is knoppix available I don't see any reason for Debian
> not having a real first class installation system with a very good
> hardware database.
>
A- Knoppix is Debian based. Well targeted distributions based on Debian
has been one of Debian's goals from the start. Knoppix is a Debian
success story! Why does the base distro need to move in that
direction? It's already there ;-)
B- Don't like Debian's install? Use Knoppix single command, one
partition installation, redirect apt's sourcelist to your favorite
repository and add packages to your hearts content. I've done this
and so have my neighbors.
C- No single distribution can be all things to all demographics.
Debian's goal is to be useful in general, so specific installations
are possible. Debian attempts to provide defaults that are the most
useful. That doesn't mean they work as expected in all cases.
D- While Knoppix' excellent installation diagnostics recognize and
configure much of the current, new, hardware, many older machines
simply will not run it that _will_ run Debian. It is a great solution
to the "Desktop" but probably isn't organized or configured to be a
very useful server (haven't tried) and certainly doesn't solve
everyone's needs. That isn't Knoppix' goal, nor is it Debian's.
E- As long as there are folks asking to become Debian Developers, and
people like Knopper creating well targeted distros with our work,
Debian is doing what it set out to do, and the future is far from
uncertain. If we fail to excite RH/SUSE/Mandrake users, so what!?
They have a distro they like, and who are we to say they are twisted
and backward! This IS about software freedom after all ;-)
The fact that you can get Debian on a Knoppix CD for under $10 from
CheapBytes, when my last Suse CDs cost me $79, lookes like highly
competative marketing to me.
Getting your system to work the way you want it to will always be the
reponsibility of the end user/administrator no matter how much hand
holding the distro provides. I find some things are Debian specific, but
most of my configuration problems are just plain Linux issues that I need
to learn to understand. My current problem is getting frame buffer support
into a custom kernel. Any ideas?
Waiting is,
Dwarf
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