On 24/11/11 12:30, Sam Vagni wrote:
Probably because its not as well publicised as other distros, often the ones that shout the loudest arent the best. Plus Debian has been around a long time, and always had a bit of a reputation of being hard to setup, but that was in the past, in the last few years its come on so much in terms of ease of use with a new installer and so on.Debian - yeas I heard of its rock solid stability! But I have not heard of newbies using it, seems typical for them, so as a newbie would it not be that difficult...? I am after all not a geek user!
I would say its as easy as any other distro. 99.9% of everything youre ever likeley to need is in the official package repository as a .deb package. You can use the bundled GUI tools (Synaptic) to browse what there is and install it, or search on the web at http://packages.debian.org (useful sometimes for getting firmware packages via another machine to get your network card working) or you can use the command line tools:you might need to manually install the fimware packages for some of your hardware with Debian (its not installed by default) which you dont need to do with other distros but its not difficult and the end result is worth it.Lastly, I am confused, if using Debian and installing software is easy or tough for noobs? Thanks.
apt-get install packagename will download and install just the package specified but the installation may fail if it depends on other packages, or aptitude install packagename will do the same but also seamlessly download & install any other packages that it depends on
if you have a .deb file which youve downloaded from the website you can install it with dpkg -i /path/to/packagename.deb