Re: Why choose Debian?
Well, here is mine.
Back in 1994 I was in college in Niagara Falls, NY. There was a business
development center at this little community college and an ISP being
"incubated". I went in for internet access, and the guy who owned the place
asked me if I wanted free Internet access if I would install Winsock on
customers computers. I said what the hell, anything for 25 bucks. They had
an O'Rielley book called "Essential Systems Administration" that he let me
borrow. He even gave me time on the BSD/OS server to study. Eventually what
started as a "Winsock" installer job turned into a sysadmin's job.
I loved BSD and eventually wanted to do more. I heard about this thing
called FreeBSD and Linux, and how they were free. I couldn't figure out how
to download FreeBSD but downloaded Slackware instead. I toyed with it for a
while, but couldn't part with OS/2 and WfW quite yet.
Eventually a beast called Red Hat came aloung and made it possible to part
with OS/2 and WfW. I eventually bounced from Slackware to Red Hat and
eventually even figured out how to download FreeBSD.
One day I responded to an ad in the newspaper about a job at a company called
Tucows (they are based in my hometown of Flint). They were looking for a
number of different positions and I wanted to get out of the factory I was
working at as an office rat. I went in for an interview and they told me
they were looking for someone to develop a Linux site for them. I said I
knew Linux and BSD and they hired me on the spot.
I spent two years at Tucows, two very long years. Web development is the
fast food of the IT industry, and although I had an T-3 at my disposal and
had to test all the latest Linux/BSD distros and apps, it did not make up for
the lack of respect the failed to show my family life.
I found a job last year in Ann Arbor. My wife is eventually going to work
there and I get to take my Labrador to work with me when I want. Its a great
job doing Linux Consulting (which means I could be doing systems
administration or building custom solutions to anything else dealing with
Linux). They respect my family and my personal life. I have a great boss
and the people I work with are fantastic. Its a real dream job for someone
with a huge priority on my family life.
I had been bouncing back and forth from Red Hat to Slackware to FreeBSD.
They are all fine systems, but Slackware's lack of a package system (if it
dont do dependencies, its not a package system), FreeBSD's lack of
application support, and Red Hats annoying ability to insanely break their
distro's, I decided to try something that seemes alittle more consistent and
stable. You just can't count on Red Hat to keep their distro stable. Red
Hat 7.0 made be angry beyond belief, and now that its two CD's just to
install it, and its base system is 700 megs, I had to five up the
not-so-great fezz. Plus, not to mention RPM is a joke and fragmented beyond
belief.
About the only distro I hadn't tried was Debian. I said, what the hell, and
gave it a shot. I don't think I will be going anywhere anytime soon. It is
by far the best, most stable, most incredible OS ever made. apt is
fantastic. Its stable. Its easy to use. Its free, and I mean free. I
sincerely doubt I will be going anywhere anytime soon. It truly lives up to
the freedom Linux is built on. I am definately in love with Debian.
On Friday 12 January 2001 19:33, Nate Bargmann wrote:
> 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...
--
Arthur, Melissa, and Lily Johnson
arthur@usol.com missa@usol.com
lily@usol.com
--
Links
http://photos.yahoo.com/arthurjohnson
http://photos.yahoo.com/missajohnson
http://photos.yahoo.com/celtic_48507
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