Re: Debian or Ubantu
On Sun, 21 Nov 2004 15:02:28 -0500, Cris Thomas <vze3bdmd@verizon.net> wrote:
> I've been experimenting with different PPC compatible Linuxes (Linuxi?).
> I'm not a complete newbie but I'm not an expert either. I could not get
> Mandrake installed, I was succesful with Gentoo but what a pain, YDL 4.0
> only came out today but beta testers haven't seemed to happy. Debian
> installed fairly easy, still have some minor issues with Gnome and X though.
> By comparison Ubuntu was a breeze. Insert CD and done. Pretty simple.
>
> I am slightly concerned that Ubuntu is too easy and may lack the
> capabilities for what I want to do, which I admit probably isn't all that
> complicated. Its newness also has me a little worried.
Ubuntu is a so-called "child" distribution of Debian (the release is
based on a Debian snapshot), with some narrowing of options and other
refinements to make it easy to install. Their default set of packages
have been chosen to appeal to lots of users -- it sounds like it
worked for you!
> Debian on the other hand may be more complicated than I want. I wasn't [too]
> encouraged when X took serious tweaking to get it to boot up.
The main advantage for going "straight" Debian is when you need
something that's not supported by the Ubuntu distro, and/or you are
running a platform not supported by it. Ubuntu is limited to i386,
"new-world" PPC and AMD64, whereas it seems like there's a Debian for
just about everything.
I, too, have had trouble installing most distros on my "oldworld" Macs
and outdated Pentium boxes, but so far I have been more success with
Debian than anything else. Ubuntu was a real breeze to install on my
Mother-In-Law's Pentium PC, and I have felt pretty comfortable setting
it up for her for email and occasional word processing. So I have
become pretty fond of Ubuntu on those systems it installs easily on.
But when you get "under the hood" it's a Debian system so anything you
learn there transfers just fine.
The only thing that you mentioned that would give me pause is WebDAV
-- if you just want to connect to a WebDAV server as a client that's
one thing. But it's a bit complicated to set up on a server. I think
that would be exactly the same whether you went with Ubuntu or Debian
or Gentoo or whatever.
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