Re: Debian has turned unusable.
On Mon, Apr 12, 2004 at 07:54:23PM +0200, Trollcollect wrote:
> Hello list,
>
> after 3 days of twiddling with a "recent" copy of
> debians woody release i need to vent a bit of the
> anger and frustration that this distribution has
> caused.
>
> I want to start with saying that i was a strong
> advocate of debian compared to distributions such as
> RedHat and SuSE. Being a UNIX admin professionally
> (Solaris mainly), i felt home on a debian system
> pretty quick, and the packaging method was unique
> among all linux deriatives i have seen. Also i used to
> like debians approach of stability before
> bleeding-edge stuff.
>
> However as i have to install a small network now (7
> WS's and one server), i have to reconsider this
> assessment. I downloaded woody (2 failed attempts to
> get an installation CD with the new jigdo method).
> What i got after installation was
> - a 2.2 Kernel without ext3 support
> - a KDE 2.0
> overall totally outdated and useless versions of
> libraries and software.
>
I installed several times from the woody cd and if you start the
installation with the bf24 option you will get a 2.4 kernel with an
option for ext3 and xfs file systems.
You can also install stable using the new installer.
> I then tried to figure out how to update those
> packages i need in recent versions. As i know KDE from
> Solaris, i trust enough in their own QA procedure to
> consider their 3.2.1 stable enough for usage. Why
> debian believes KDE 2.0 is more stable, or even usable
> at all, is beyond my understanding.
>
I don't know the right sources.list entry but for a desktop system you
should use either testing/unstable or woody with backports.
There are backports for most desktop packages to current versions
including kde. It doesn't enter stable officially since stable is frozen
in terms of new packages it only takes security updates.
> However it turned out that i could not update only
> selected packages easily. In fact neither of dselect
> or apt-get seemed to have a method to do this in a
> sensible way.
>
> Now it MAY well be that i am just an idiot who is not
> capable of doing this, however i asked in a few linux
> related channels and also at work, noone could tell me
> how to set up a half-way decent debian without
> compromising the pkg system. Sure many told me to
> build it all by hand but then, without the packaging
> system what good is debian?
>
> I hope that whoever is responsible for the direction
> debian is steering to currently thinks about the
> target of the whole distribution, which is to provide
> users with a decent linux system that comes stable,
> yet with all neccessary parts to be competetive among
> other distributions.
>
>
>
>
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>
>
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