dbarker@turing.cs.camosun.bc.ca wrote:
I have performed many sarge and sid installations in the last few months, both with and without DI. It's quite different for myself to install sarge or sid, than it is for ordinary unix/linux folks. I've been an admin for quite some time, and I take it personal when a machine and an installation goes south....Thus spake James (james@buffer.net):Hello,I've googled around but can seem to find a date for the release of Sarge as stable. Anyone have any guesses?September 19 according the schedule I saw yesterday.Will it include Debian Installer, or use a more historical approach to installation?The new one. Checkout yesterday's /. which had an item.Will Debian woody systems be able to seemlessly use an upgrade semantic published by Debian.org, or will it be a feeding freenzy.You can always upgrade from one versino to another without doig a fresh install. On one machine I originally installed woody, then dist-upgraded to sarge.
I've got a group of portable user's that are trying to decide between Debian and Gentoo. Naturally, I've gotten caught in the mix, so I'm looking for thoughts and ideas.Debian is IMHO the only distribution worth bothering with and (debian-derived distros) I'm sure gentoo has its points, but would laptop users (I'm presuming that's what you mean, not that the users themselves are portable) really want to have to compile everything everytime?
Um, I really like Debian, especially for newbie's and portable installations, but, Gentoo, is great for soucecode work, patching, and optimization. Debian Sid could learn from Gentoo, in the area of advanced uses, in my opinion. Hands down I'd choose Gentoo_stage1 over Debian(sarge or sid) for advanced work. You see, it really boils down to focus. On Gentoo, you just ask, and people answer, no matter how intricate the compiler, architecture, .... questions are.
On Debian, you have to look to find out how to get things working, or know somebody...(no offense or flame intended, it just MY experience). This does not stop me form using and still liking Debian, but compiling with distcc 100% from source, is an educational learning experience unmatched, in my experience.
Good to know, as the last 30 days, I've been working with Gentoo_stage one installations. Lots of issues, but, when you are done, it's a wonderful platform, especially for learning and porting code between different uProcessors. I mostly do embedded work on 8,16 and 32 bit processors. Often, there is no RTOS, we build a state machine from scratch. Getting embedded linux running on a 32 bit arm processor is a daunting task, unless you use vendor_linux....(been there done that, and it's no longer an option!). Gentoo has provide a deep view of how a linux distro comes together. It shows you what is linux and what isPS. Woody is way too old of a distro for me to recommend.......I have installed 3 machines (one desktop two laptops) using the beta versions of the sarge installer. Very few problems which I expect will have been fixed in the RC1 of the installer which was announced a couple of days ago.
'distro mentality'.LFS, Linux From Scratch, is another distro that bridges the gap between a linux distro, and the learning path as to what's needed, with or without a RTOS, to get ethernet and other drivers working. I'm still figuring out linux(2.6) based kernels for embedded systems, so bouncing between distros, makes for detailed learning and great fun!
All in all, Debian is a very sweet distro, and it's the distro that I recommend for converts to Linux. Debian is also (currently) my distro of choice for portables......
Gentoo is awesome, on the high_end of things....... the performance gains for custom tweeking a box, are quite often, impressive. Compiling code is not a hassle, it's what microprocessors in a distributed enviroment are ment to do, in my opinion. Openmosix is a snap with Gentoo, what is debian plan for using openmosix kernels, on a portable, so when I plug into a network with outher 2.6 based kernel machines I can aggregate all computational resources? This is an excellent area for a portable to have that 'kernel edge' as my portable(s) are often installed on different networks, for various amounts of time. This is where Gentoo's support is clear. What's Debian got planned for openmosix on a portable? Latest kernel hacks and how do you compile with different kernel elements to tweak a portable for optimiztion?
(please no flames! i.e. give me the Debian vision, not an attack on gentoo?)
James
Hope this helps.