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Re: What's wrong with debian?



Well, consider the alternatives for a few. My experience has been with screen reader enabled versions of linux and covers debian; slackware, and what's now called fedora formerly redhat. I have subscriptions to slackware and maybe debian might do well to offer subscriptions in future too. Fedora was the most difficult to install and reinstall of these distros. out of the box fedora security was effectively wide open. Another sysadmin who installed it had to turn off several servers and do various other tightening jobs. Slackware was easier to install but of the three distros has the least available for updating the system and security that I've been able to find on the internet. I need to get the other sysadmin to install a copy of slackware for out of the box security evaluation so some comparison may be possible. Fedora's architecture back in the redhat days broke tcp-wrappers so versions of tcp-wrappers fedora has since installed have been broken to force them to conform with fedora. Specifically tcpdcheck is missing as are the other tcp-wrappers utilities so even if it is installed it's difficult to fine tune what it's doing and monitor results of security tightening with that package. slackware seems to be missing the full package too but that might be because I haven't searched the right directory for tcpdcheck. debian has been the C-64 of the Linux world because more packages are available on the net for it than its other two competitors. That's part of what comes with this particular territory an embarrassment of riches brings with it its own problems. I'm sure everyone on this list is aware of the security concept of running lean systems. That is, if six editors are available and those on the system only use one editor it's adviseable to remove and exclude the other five editors. Perhaps software useage profiling which offers to remove and exclude packages already exists but it seems in a situation like this with an embarrassment of riches using software to help keep systems lean might go some way to helping out. I've found debian also to be the easiest installed and reinstalled distro too for those I've tried so far too.



On Thu, 3 Mar 2005, Benedict Verheyen wrote:

Caveman wrote:
 I could not agree more. I love debian and I think its a great system,
 however the whole release cycle thing is starting to become a issue.
 Woody is just getting too old, even for servers. So what options do
 you have ? Well you can use sarge, seems stable enough, however no
 security. Thats a major issue in my mind.
 I could use unstable, which I have found to be highly stable and I use
 apt-listbugs with it which has not seen me deal with a breakage yet.
 However the large number of updates that unstable gets (as it should)
 starts to make this possess time consumming. So where does that leave
 us? To me it starts to make debian far less useful. Which is very sad
 as I think its the best distro I have ever used.
 I understand that running a distro is very hard work, however I think
 the debian people really need to look at their whole system.
 Maybe there are some core issues which are causing the problem.
 However from a end user point of view its annoying.

 Hopefully its something that can be sorted out soon, before people
 start using other distros.

 Caveman


I don't think people would be so sensitive about the release cycle if the alternatives where explained and documented better. If you use woody and make your own/use backports then i really isn't an issue because you're running a stable tested system with the latest software. But as i said, there should be good documentation on how to backport so people can do it themselves. This is also the way to go for security because you take a risk installing somebody elses backports.

Off course when the release cycle would continue to grow, then we have a more fundamental problem.

Regards,
Benedict

--
Benedict Verheyen                   Debian User
http://www.heimdallitservices.be    Public Key 0x712CBB8D


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