Hesitating to take the plunge in Debian
Having just hosed my Linuxppc installation, I'm looking into trying
out Debian, which have heard so many things about. I understand that an
official release is coming soon but I need to be running something in the
next few days... So I have several question. I'm running a PowerMac 7300,
with a Rage Orion card, external Zip and CDRW.
1)How easy is it to install Debian for PowerPC right now, for someone who's
used MkLinux and Linuxppc for the last 2 and a half years? The only
installation instructions I've seen are at:
http://www.debian.org/~wmono/powerpc/
Are these still accurate and is there any other documentation?
2) Is there anything missing from the distribution, compared to Linuxppc?
Will I still be able to run windowmaker, TkStep, Nextaw, FSViewer,
postilion, MOL, Netscape, xmms, xemacs, exmh, Rage 128 accelerated Xpmac,
compile my own kernels? Are Debian packages also available in source form
(like the source RPM's) so that I can compile anything not available for
PowerPC in binary form? How well does the RPM to Debian package converter
(alien?) work, for any RPM not available in Debian form (like MOL?)?
How do the administration tools compare with the Red Hat ones?
3) This mailing list seems to be pretty low volume, is it because very
few people are running Debian PowerPC or is it because it's trouble free?
Are these any good Debian mailing lists I should know about?
4) Finally, when the official Debian distribution for PowerPC comes out,
will I be able to upgrade to it trivially, or will I have to do a complete
reinstall?
Thanks you very much for your advice. Thanks,
Renaud
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