Re: about debian

[Robert Ribnitz <robert.ribnitz@unifr.ch>]

tristian radford wrote:

> Hi i just wanted to know some info on debian my friend at college 
> tells me all about it and he says it all good but what it is i was 
> thinking about using debian (im currenly using mandrake) because it 
> has its own installer which makes it easyer to get things and i head 
> alot of good things about "app get". But i heard that debian is pretty 
> hard to install and I just wanted to get the low down details.
>
> Well the main reason why I want to use debian is because Yahoo has 
> made an official messenger and as the latest version of gaim is broken 
> its beginning to get me annoyed and with an official version of yahoo 
> my mum will be pleased (im only 16 so it still normal to live at home 
> ;) ).

Hello Tristian,

you can find alot about debian on our website:

http://www.debian.org

Here are some reasons why you could use debian:

- Its entirely community-supported, ie. there's no large company behind 
it giving out new releases. Rather, its a bunch of friends doing all the 
release and development stuff.

- It is free (in the sense free speech, not free beer)

- Its there for 11 different architectures. The 'same' debian that runs 
on your box will run on the biggest IBM Mainframe 
(http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/eserver/zseries/800linux.html, e.g). So if 
you can use it on your box, you could -potentially - also operate it on 
such a mainframe (your bank surely has one or two of those standing around)

- There are three versions out there, 'stable', 'testing' and 'unstable' 
(codenamed 'woody', 'sarge' and 'sid' at the moment). Stable gets 
security updates, but is frozen otherwise, so most of the applications 
will be too old for your taste. 'Unstable' gets all the newest software, 
but it is the developer release, so it breaks often. 'Testing' is 
mid-way, so its quite usable with mostly recent packages. On the 
downside, it does not get security updates regularly, but rather you'll 
have to wait the usual ten days till the new version trickles in from 
'unstable.

And here are a few reasons why using debian is tricky:

- Mandrake has a nice-looking graphical installer that guides you 
through all the  process. Debian's installer is text-based, asks alot 
more questions, and generally requires you to know more about your 
computer than Mandrake does.

- 'apt-get' (which has also been ported to Mandrake, btw) allows you to 
install or remove packages. It will automattically satisfy dependencies, 
and fetch the packages from the net. Since this is so neat, Debian 
people use it alot, so most of the Debian Installation and Maintenance 
tools are text-based, commandline tools (not those stylish graphical 
tools mandrake has).

- If you want ot stay up to date (with the testing, or unstable 
distributions), you'll find that debian fetches a lot of soware from the 
net.

- Some software is free (you are free to use it for anythng you like, 
you are free to analyse it how it works, to adapt it, and ofc you can 
share the original or the adapted version with anyone you like), other 
software is not quite as free. Debian is rather strict about this 
distinction, and some things that you find in Mandrake (like for example 
Java), you'll have to get from third parties in debian (since Java is 
not free).

If you want an example of what debian might look like:

- Morphix (http://www.morphix.org) is based on debian, but optimised to 
run off a CD. I think there's a Gamer ISO at
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/morphix/MorphixCombined-Gamer-0.4-1.iso?download

- Knoppix (http://www.knoppix.org) is another live-CD distribution 
largely based on debian

And if you like debian, and want to contribute, you can also become a 
developer and become part of the project.

Robert
What I do for debian is I maintain a search engine for local webpages