Re: Considering switching to debian
On Thu, Mar 08, 2001 at 05:04:15PM -0800, Jim Richardson wrote:
> I am currently using SuSE (6.4 and 7.0 on various machines) but am getting fed
> up with the name mangling suse performs on packages. For some reason, the
> package names follow the 8.3 msdos naming convention, as if that wasn't bad
> enough, the name of the package _inside_ the rpm (where it doesn't matter to
> the filesystem at all) is _also_ 8,3. Frankly, this sucks. There are some other
> issues with suse that I won't bore you with, but the crux of the issue is that
> I am considering switching to debian and have a few questions before I take the
> plunge.
Hrrm... 8.3'ness sucks, but doesn't seem like enough to push someone to
Debian. (Though the 'final straw' for me with Slack was the 'version
inflation' which was silly enough to make me try Debian... and then I
fell in love and within a week I had removed slack from all my machines. :))
> 1) How "good" is laptop support ? apm, pcmcia, etc
Works fine for me on my noname laptop. Haven't tried it with 2.4 yet,
since that changes all the pcmcia stuff and it scares me. :)
> 2) I want to use 2.4.x kernel to get access to good usb and iptables
> is this stable enough for general use ?
Seems to be. I've been using it for months without a problem.
> 3) Can I use the stable dist, and add the unstable/testing packages
> I want, like latest gnome, without too many problems or is it
> either/or?
At the moment? It's probably either/or... lots of things have changed
between 'stable' and testing and unstable. (glibc and perl, especially,
which tend to pretty much make everything else update...)
> 4) How difficult is it to build deb packages from tarballs? ie
> ./configure;make; -> make a deb. Since I am likely to want to
> play with code that has no current .deb
Supposedly not hard, though there's really so little I locally compile
any more I don't bother. Most of the stuff I compile is just 'tweaks'
to the debian-supplied version (like I dislike some of the functions
available in the posix module of php when run in 'safe-mode'... letting
users walk the password file scares me... so I disable those and make my
own deb since the php upstream doesn't seem to think that's unsafe even
though open("/etc/passwd") would be... I also sometimes steal source
packages from unstable and backport them to potato for The Machines I
Shouldn't Play With But Can't Help... that's trivial.)
Debian's archives are pretty complete and usually pretty well updated,
so I don't really bother compiling much except for what's mentioned
above.
> 5) Can I "downgrade" packages easily if they cause probs?
Not as easily as upgrading (which is trivial on Debian... :)), but
certainly no harder than 'dpkg --force-downgrade -i whatever-0.9.deb'
(and I don't recall actually having to use the '--force-downgrade'
switch...)
--
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