Re: Why choose Debian?
My story.
Back in August '96 I had just performed major brain surgery on my
computer which brought it from an AMD386DX-40 to a 486DX4/100 (which it
still is). I was reading the Def Leppard newsgroup and there was a
posting touting Linux (true!), so I decided to pursue further.
I asked a good friend of mine (also an amateur radio operator) if he had
heard of it and not only had he, he was running it! So, I had to take a
look. Needless to say, his Slackware 3.0 FVWM desktop was less than
impressive. However, I was intrigued and he sent me home with a book he
had (Slackware Linux Unleashed?) with a Slack 3.0 CD in the sleeve.
Several days of reading and printing docs followed with the initial
install happening sometime in September '96. I didn't have enough room
for X, so I played with the command line a bit. Learned to hate VI in
short order, found joe, then Midnight Commander (my primary file tool to
this day).
About a month later a local book/music store had Slack '96 (the four
disk set) for $14.95, so I snapped it up and moved up to the world of
Linux 2.0.x. The second install was done in early November of '96 and
although I later moved the file system to a larger HD, I never did a
re-install. I learned how to update kernels, updated libc (that was
hairy!), and Xfree to 3.3.0 within the first year. All this time I
dual-booted between Slack and Win 3.11.
In the fall of '97 I moved to Wichita, KS and started hanging around
on the Air Cap LUG mailing lists and learned about many things including
Debian, of which I knew it existed, but not much more. Three years ago
this month I made Linux my primary OS and resolved to use Win '95
(installed in July '97) as little as possible.
Well, '98 turned to '99 and I was trying all manner of programs, but the
handwriting was on the wall, move to glibc 2.x or get left behind. Fed
up with the manual dependency checking on Slack, and having to happen
onto a laptop (IBM 760ED, sans CD) during the summer of '99 and put Slink
on this box in September of that year. Moving from Slack to Debian wasn't
hard as far as the software was concerned, what was difficult was learning
the "Debian Way(TM)" and figuring out things like adding a user to the dip
group rather than changing a bunch of file level permissions to give a
user the ability to start PPP, for example. This list was very
instrumental in that learning curve (I'm still learning, thanks all!).
In early 2000 (around the 10th of January), sendmail on my Slack box
stopped sending mail. No other Y2K issues had been found, so I set
aside a weekend to upgrade that box to Slink and then started playing
with frozen Potato on this laptop, which had a few moments in May when
PCMCIA broke the kernel serial driver! However, since August both boxes
have been current with stable Potato.
In a word, apt-get rocks! People have difficulty believing the
stability of Debian and the ease of apt-get. In fact I mostly use
dselect and I don't harbor the disdain for it that others may (I tried
console-apt for the first time last weekend and it has a long way to go
before it replaces dselect for me ;-).
When it is all said and done, the Debian community has not failed me.
The software ain't bad either!
- Nate >>
P.S. I've learned to unhate VI, now using VIM for many things...
--
Wireless | Amateur Radio Station N0NB | "None can love freedom
Internet | n0nb@networksplus.net | heartily, but good
Location | Wichita, Kansas USA EM17hs | men; the rest love not
Wichita area exams; ham radio; Linux info @ | freedom, but license."
http://www.qsl.net/n0nb/ | -- John Milton
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