The following is a copy of email I have sent to a friend who has been working with Debian. I have expressed doubts to him many times concerning the problems I had been having with my own Debian system. I had been having trouble compiling 2.1.X kernels, and in other ways too the system was broken. I didn't have time to update/upgrade, and apt wouldn't deal with the kludged up system. Finally I have reinstalled from a 2.0 LSL CD, upgraded to up-to-date Hamm, and then straight up to Slink via apt-get dist-upgrade. Now I am selectively upgrading to some potato packages.
The following is my take on the amazingly clean Debian distribution and its amazing tools. As a user of Debian for well over three years, I have been plagued by doubts. Today, I want to express my gratitude to the many Debian developers who have contributed to this system, not to mention to all of the thousands of programmers who have contributed to the extant free software base. (I over heard a local computer shop owner saying that Windows 98 upgrades are causing all kinds of problems; perhaps he was seeding his clientele with FUD, but all the same, it makes me laugh.) Thanks. (I have taken the liberty of mailing copies to debian-user and debian-devel). Alan Davis -------BEGIN MAIL TO MY FRIEND ABOUT DEBIAN---------- I've been having fun with Debian since my upgrade. Apt is a FANTASTIC piece of work. Please try it. After I reinstalled from the older CD, I ran "apt-get update; apt-get upgrade" to bring the installation up-to-date. It took a few hours. Apt goes out over the internet to Debian's main server, and ftps the files necessary to bring the system up to date, then installs. It works well. Only a few glitches. Solvable---right now X11 is a bit fragile if you update to slink, but to update Hamm is really cool. That is the CD was Hamm, and I told apt to update Hamm to the up to date files on the FTP site, since there have been a few fixes, etc. The update went well. Then I pointed apt to the slink area on the FTP site and told it to update the distribution to slink: "apt-get update-dist". 100MB of files were required. There are currently some glitches, since slink is not yet "stable", so I used the -d (download only, do not install) switch to apt-get. There is discussion on the mailing list about problems with the upgrade, but I couldn't get any answers (the list is much larger, the subscriber base has apparently grown beyond imagination, and what was once one-to-one help in virtually every case is not apparently happening. Maybe people are tired of my requests too.) I finally decided, the next day (after the 100MB of files had been FTPd automatically) to give the install a try. It took a bit over an hour, I guess. X was broken. A couple packages were broken. There were some glitches with apt downloading packages I hadn't requested, and apt not following the list of wanted upgrades and holds I had carefully tried to do with dselect---it's possible that I don't yet understand how to use it all. Dselect was always out of my control. Apt is amazing though. It updates to slink, finds no inconsistencies. I had to manually get the x11 files. The problem is that there is no one-to-one mapping of hamm to slink in some packages. One hamm package is found in four or more slink files. (More of the rampant fractionalization I have detected in Debian before.) It took a couple hours to get it fixed. By the way, outside of mainstream hours, suddenly there is a radical improvement in PCI. I was getting consistent 3.3 kb/s ftp speeds. Thus the 100MB took only a relatively few hours! Once I had slink going, I pointed to potato, the newer distribution that isn't yet even frozen, so all ongoing new compiles have been going in there since October. I have used apt to upgrade specific packages from potato, such as the packages needed to compile the newest kernels. AND THEY COMPILE OK! And there is new video code in the newest kernels, including multiple matrox support. Including a whole new way of abstracting the video hardware. It works well, I think. This is pre 2.2.0 code. 2.2 will be the next stable releases, it's been way over a year and a half that 2.1 has been in limbo. I started tweaking with apt, installing some specific packages, and decided to try to install some x11 files that I saw on the FTP site, in potato. I used "apt-get install <packagename>." Well, some package couldn't be installed, cause of unmet dependencies on some libraries. Apt get told me, and suggested I try to reinstall with the -f switch to apt-get. It worked, installed all needed packages to meet the unmet dependencies. So I tried gnome. That's the subject of this message. Gnome ROCKS. There is a Gnome application called electric eyes for browsing directories of graphics---wow. Of course the GIMP is also more than compatible, since Gnome also depends on the GNU gtk+ libraries, etc. Mc was written by the guy who I think started gnome, Miquel van Smoorenberg (spelling wrong). This guy is in Mexico, and has been a key linux developer. I am now apt-getting the gnome mc package. Hey, it's installed and I started it up. Looks like a great file manager, with graphical folder icons, etc. I've been tweaking afterstep. But this Gnome is radically better. It runs well under Windowmaker, which is a good window manager. I'm stoked. Don't sweat any longer the small stuff. Alan ----------END MAIL TO MY FRIEND------------ -- Alan E. Davis Marianas High School (Science Department) AAA196, Box 10001 [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.saipan.netpci.com/~adavis Saipan, MP 96950 15.16oN 145.7oE GMT+10 Northern Mariana Islands
