Re: the best Linux for me

From: Iain Little (lirvon_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 12/29/04 

Date: Thu, 30 Dec 2004 02:59:35 +1100

cstacy@news.dtpq.com (Christopher C. Stacy) writes:

> I get the impression that most people here are using Debian.
> Why is that?

I can't speak for anyone else, but I use Debian because of quality of
the packaging, and the ease with which you can install/upgrade/remove
packages.

> All I know about Debian is "dselect", which seems rather nightmarish
> from the little bit that I used it. Incredibly tedious hand-picking
> hundreds and hundreds of packages from a hard-to-use VT100 interface
> Did I miss something? What's Debian's package / distro system called?
> And by the way, why do people hate rpms?

Ugh - I don't like dselect; at least when I last used it (a couple of
years ago), it made a complete mess of the dependencies. But dselect
is just one frontend to the packaging system; when I want that sort of
thing, I use a program called `aptitude'. But what people are usually
talking about when they refer to debian's packaging system is 'Apt',
which is the level below any graphical frontend.

It sounds like the main thing that you missed is that you don't have
to tediously go through the packages one by one. If you want to
install something, then you you just have to select the appropriate
package, and it will[1] automagically sort out the dependencies for
you.

For example, if you want to install some of the lispy stuff, then:

$ apt-get install cmucl sbcl clisp ilisp

push enter a couple of times, maybe answer a couple of configuration
questions (depends on whether or not you want to be bothered by those,
or are prepared to accept defaults), and its all set up. [Most of the
Lisp library packages start with the prefix "cl-", for example
"cl-ppcre".]

And when you want to upgrade everything, then:

$ apt-get update
$ apt-get dist-upgrade

Will get the lastest version (for whatever you are using:
stable/testing/unstable) of all of the packages you have installed.

Actually, a while ago people made a version of apt that works with
RPMs, so its technically possible to do this stuff with Redhat as
well. The difference is that availability of packages, and the
quality of the packaging:

1) Debian has far more `official' packages available than Redhat.

2) The packages are available from numerous mirrors online; just point
   apt at the closest one and download away. After the initial
   install you generally don't bother with a CD, and update your
   system as often as it suits you.

3) There is a community built up around the packaging system and a set
   of guidelines about where packages are allowed to install stuff and
   whatnot, so the (official) packages are generally of a higher
   quality than a random RPM from somebody's website.

[1] Almost always -- admittedly things do sometimes break, although
usually only if you are running 'testing' or 'unstable'. (Unstable is
the absolute newest of everything, testing is halfway in between
stable and unstable.)

> I have "Woody" release CDs from a few years ago that I am going to install.
> I think I can just type some incantation and get all the updates to it.
> But there's a new "release" of Debian coming out someday.
> When it's time to switch to it from the "Woody" release, how would I
> go about doing that? Is it some massive starting-all-over exercise,
> or just type something at the net and come back the next morning?
> Is Gentoo better about that?

Just point apt at the repository you want (configuration in
"/etc/apt/sources.list"), update and then dist-upgrade. Occasionally
you might have to uninstall something, but usually the
update/dist-upgrade is enough.

I havn't used Gentoo, so I can't comment much on it, but I understand
that has a similar system to apt ('emerge'). Gentoo is supposed to be
based on the idea of 'compile everything from source'; supposedly it
can take several days to install KDE. In theory this is supposed to
make everything faster, as you can use the compiler flags specific for
your machine, but the benefit of this has been disputed.

> One thing I want to do is have some software that's (I guess)
> not going to be managed from the Linux distro. In particular,
> I will often be wanting the latest version and sources for things
> like cmucl (and apache, postfix, and maybe a few random others.)

$ apt-get install cmucl cmucl-source apache postfix
$ apt-get source apache postfix

> I'm going to use this machine as my main computer, so I will
> want junk like OpenOffice, Acrobat, samba, Firefox, etc.

$ apt-get install openoffice.org samba mozilla-firefox

I think Acrobat is in the `non-free' section, but I don't currently
have that included in sources.list, so I can't check.

> Another requirement is that I be able to type some simple command
> to get all the latest security patches to all the distro-managed parts
> of the system. Other than that, I just want the system to have lots
> of goodies, all the standard junk (including the other development
> environments like GCC, Qt,and J2EE), to be well supported.

For security patches, include:

deb http://security.debian.org stable/updates main contrib non-free

in your sources.list, then update/upgrade.

Java is a bit of a pain to install because the license prevents it
from being included in the repositories, so you have to download it
from Sun's website.

> I'm going to run GNOME, I guess. Isn't that what you're supposed to run?
> They all look the same to me.

Meh - I just use a window manager without a desktop environment. But
if you insist:

$ apt-get install gnome

> Why do some people prefer GRUB and some prefer LILO?

With LILO you have to remember to do the magic incantation when you
recompile the kernel. (Hey, you arn't really running Linux unless you
have custom-compiled your kernel, right? ;-) ):

$ lilo

With GRUB you are supposed to not have to do that; maybe there are
other benefits as well. As far as I am concerned, they both do the
same job, and I am used to how the LILO config file works, so I use
that.

> I've been putting this off for a while now, but I somehow accidently
> trashed my Linux system last night while plugging in a new disk drive.
> Most of the files I cared about seem to be on an intact ext3 partition,
> so I just have to be very careful not to blow that away when I install
> a new operating system. I installed Debian on a small partition, just
> to poke around at things, but will need to do a complete re-installation.
> An idiot-proof partition editor is desirable.

This should be easy enough from the Debian installer; it uses cfdisk,
which I have never had a problem with.

Iain

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