Re: Why choose Debian?
WARNING WARNING WARNING!!!!! This is very long-winded. You can skip to
the last paragraph.
My trajectory to debian actually started when I got out of Grad school (1981)
and decided that I wanted to do calculations at home. My first home machine was
a Kaypro with two (count them!) floppy drives that ran CP/M. I actually wrote
several important papers on that machine and did some small monte-carlo
calculations. My next machine was , I think, an 8088 running DOS with this
really neat front end called norton commander. I then went to a 286 (with
an external math coprocessor I'll have you know). All of this time I had spent
really disliking UNIX. I had grown up on CDC machines and what time I spent
on unix machines was very painful. The termcaps ALMOST worked. and
it appeared to have a purposefully rotten fortran compiler. It took an enorm-
ously long time to compile code that ran really slowly. (You should know that
there is still a large, active group of scientists that think C stands for
cryptic- That it was designed as a write-only language.) UNIX simply seemed
like a garage project from Bell Labs that wasn't ready for prime time.
Only when I went to University and was given a SPARC-1 did I start liking unix.
First, someone had finally written a decent fortran compiler. Second, the term-
caps really did work (at least on the sun) and the windowing system was, I
thought, pretty slick. Third, I began to appreciate the consistency of learning only one set of utilities that could be used anywhere that ran
unix.
It was about three years later that I decided I wanted to have UNIX at
home. Two years after that (1997) I was on sabbatical, now using a 486DX, and
I decided to try Linux. It was Red Hat 4.1 and getting it running was something
of a nightmare. I had the LI error and ended up almost wiping out all the data
on my hard drive trying to fix it.. That's when I learned alot about FAT's.
I will say that the
moment Linux started working, I was a much happier person. I knew that I owned
a real computer. I could, for the first time, really do calculations at home.
I was pretty happy with Red Hat until it started to get very expensive. I then
shifted to SuSE. That was OK, but as I got more confident with Linux, I wanted
more control. Also, I now had a Linux box at work and one at home. The one at
work had come with Debian loaded. I started to really like its organization.
For instance, I liked the way /etc is organized and the way fvwm2 worked.
Also, I got tired of having to keep several systems in my head (remember
that I'm a physicist and not a computer scientist). I had avoided actually
installing debian on my own machines because of the reputation of its install.
I decided to take the plunge and Install Debian. In retrospect, I don't know what all the fuss
was about. After installing RH 4.1, debian seemed pretty straight forward.
I'll admit that the module installation was a bit foreign, and I had to figure
out what kind of ethernet card I had, but it was just fine. I acutally came
to like the low-level character of the install because it gives great control.
More importantly, I finally had one flavor of Linux that I decided to learn
fairly completely. I didn't even know about apt-get until about a year ago.
It is just incredible. Finally, the lists are simply the best support I've
ever had.
Art Edwards
Yes, yes, yes, this was very long-winded but useful for me. I realized that
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