Re: connecting to my box

[Peter Cordes <peter@llama.nslug.ns.ca>]

On Sat, Jan 27, 2001 at 08:42:19PM -0600, Mohammed Elzubeir wrote:
> 
> Nathan,
> 
> That was not my intention, to 'flame' but possibly 'bitch'. I am new to
> Debian and how they do things, and so far it has been the hardest Linux
> distribution to
> understand.

 It _is_ difficult to understand.  However, the time spent learning is worth
the reward!  Once you've been using Debian for a while, you'll find that
things make a lot of sense.  

 Make sure you're not running unstable, though.  Run stable or testing until
you understand Debian, or you will find a lot more stuff that doesn't make
sense!  If you installed unstable, then just change /etc/apt/sources.list to
use testing.  apt won't downgrade your packages, but after a while testing
will catch up with the package versions you have installed.  If a package is
broken, uninstall it, then reinstall.  You will get the version from stable
or testing, instead of the unstable one which was installed before.)

 Debian is very powerful, but using that power requires some experience.
Unix itself is not very easy to understand, as there is a lot of stuff to
know about, like shell syntax (e.g. loops, quoting), processes, and device
files.  Once you understand the system, you can make good use of it.  If you
use computers a lot, then the time you save by being able to write shell
scripts to automate things will be more than the time spent learning.
Similarly with Debian, you can let the package system take care of routine
upgrades to all the various stuff that makes a complete system.  If you want
to manually take care of something like Apache, you can.  The main benefit
of Debian is all the upgrades to the small packages, which would never get
done if you had to do it by hand.  Also, the default config files for almost
all packages have been set up so that they work well with the rest of the
Debian system, instead of just leaving them as they were in the source
tarball (which usually means you need to change them to get them to work, or
to get them to work well).

-- 
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ;  e-mail: X(peter@llama.nslug. , ns.ca)

"The gods confound the man who first found out how to distinguish the hours!
 Confound him, too, who in this place set up a sundial, to cut and hack
 my day so wretchedly into small pieces!" -- Plautus, 200 BCE