Re: Help on Debian advocacy
Van Buggenhaut Eric <vanbuggenhout@brutele.be> wrote:
[I've reformatted your message with proper quoting to make it more
readable.]
>N. Raghavendra wrote:
>>2) Are Potato CD's available in the market? If so what version of the
>>Linux kernel do they ship with?
>
>Since potato isn't "stable" yet, no CD's have been released yet.
CD images are being released on the net for testing at the moment, I
believe; have a look at the archives of debian-cd@lists.debian.org and
debian-testing@lists.debian.org on the Debian website (www.debian.org).
>>3) There are about 30 public machines in the computer center here, all
>>sharing a common file system through NFS, and all of them YP
>>clients. If they install Debian on all these machines, how difficult
>>would it be for sysadmins to periodically upgrade to a more recent
>>kernel in all of them? Can it be done at one go, or do they have to
>>upgrade the kernel in each machine searately?
>
>Debian upgrades are made through an app called "apt-get". Keeping your
>system up-to-date means typing *2* command lines :-)
Note that apt-get on its own won't upgrade your kernel from the official
kernel sources; somebody needs to turn those sources into packages. If
you want to use apt to upgrade kernels then you can use the
'kernel-package' package to build packages of the kernel of your choice,
then put them somewhere apt-get-able (and various people here will be
able to tell you how to do that).
If you wanted to upgrade all the machines simultaneously, though, you'd
want to use netbooting or similar, where you TFTP the kernel from a
central machine when booting rather than loading it from the local disk.
This isn't really a Debian-specific thing, but it's possible and (I
believe) not too difficult; if you don't get an answer here then a
newsgroup like comp.os.linux.networking might know more about it.
>>4) How does Debian compare with SuSE and Redhat with respect to the
>>number and nature of packages in the distribution? I am quite
>>satisfied with the 1500 or so packages in Hamm main, but the
>>establishment guys here say that they want a distro with as many
>>packages as possible.
>
>[Van Buggenhaut Eric] Debian ships with 2500 packages, i think
potato for i386 systems currently has 3937 packages in main (completely
free, goes on all CDs), 123 in contrib (free but depends on non-free
stuff), 317 in non-free, 62 in non-US/main, none in non-US/contrib, and
23 in non-US/non-free. That's a total of 4462 packages.
--
Colin Watson [cjw44@flatline.org.uk]
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