Michael Kaminsky said: > of Debian seems sorely lacking. Mandrake seems to put out RPMs > within 1-2 days of the upstream developers. There are still no > Debian packages for software I use regularly that's been out for > > 1 month (according to the debian web page package search form).
i consider this a GOOD thing. having stable packages are good. i don't want to upgrade every day. i reccomend mandrake for newbies but despite all its new stuff it has a ton of problems last time i used it.(which was a while ago i admit). each distro has it's strength. one of debian's is it is stable, one of mandrakes is it has the bleeding edge. > Example: gnucash. i don't even balance my checkbook so i don't have a use for a program like gnucash. > > * Apt + dselect seem very powerful, efficient if you use them > together > correctly. From the mailing lists, though, "correctly" seems to > be a matter of confusion (or perhaps just preference). RPMs > don't cut it for bleeding edge multiple-dependency upgrades (as > you all know well). This reason is key to my wanting to change > over. Have the people who wrote these systems outlined their > correct usage in a FAQ/manpage/etc.? if i was to need such a bleeding edge system i would use slackware probably. you lose much of the advantage of debian in my opinion by using such bleeding edge things, might as well stick to compiling from source only. > > testing but grab select packages from unstable by configuring > "pins" in an apt_preferences file. Are there simple instructions > for doing so? if i need something from unstable(which is rare) i use the source function of apt-get (apt-get -b source <packagename>) never messed witht he apt preferences and never heard of pins. as far as upgrading, changing lines in sources.list and doing update ; dist-upgrade with apt-get is the easiest way to go. i would never reccomend such a thing for a newbie though, i'd consider it a good thing that there is no option to go straignt to unstable or testing from a potato installation. (you can do it by manually editing the sources.list on install i believe but its not obvious). > * Mandrake has very decent system configuration tools. I spent > many > years editing scripts and config files to setup up Linux > machines, but it just takes longer when it comes to simple, > basic tasks > (adding a network interface, changing the runlevel configuration > for daemons, etc.). Does Debian provide such tools (even if > clearly they don't work for all situations)? one thing i hated about mandrake was the fancy gui configuration crap. it took quite a while back with mandrake 7.0 (? or was it another 7.x) it broke BADLY with dhcp. i ended up having to hack up the startup scripts to manually run a dhcp client on boot since the internal stuff never worked. while it is true that debian has a steeper learning curve once you get there its great. i suppose i am biased as i have used so many other systems like solaris tru64 irix, aix hpux freebsd openbsd etc etc that its hard to think about 'ease of use' compared to what i use on a daily basis(the above). for some tasks i like to use webmin (http://www.webmin.com - i believe it is packaged as well in testing or unstable). one thing that linux could use -- is if IBM would open the source and port SMIT to linux. that would be great !! I'd love it if linux distros had a common configuration BACKEND(then have whatever frontend you like). AIX's backend works something like this: /usr/sbin/mknfsmnt -f '/stuff/workspace' -d '/stuff/workspace' -h 'nis-wa' '-n' '-B' '-a' -t 'rw' -w 'bg' -K '3' -k 'udp' '-y' '-Z' '-X' '-S' '-j' '-q' '-g' that adds a NFS filesystem to be mounted NOW and at boot using udp as the protocol, nfs version 3, and a bunch of other defaults. of course that command is called from a fancy point-and-click interface(SMIT). but the idea is great, a command-line backend to the system which can easily be called from any GUI app. i converted the current company im at from redhat to debian. when i started we had redhat everywhere, the mail servers had to be rebooted from time to time as they would just stop accepting connections! no errors, they would just 'die'. installing one of my homebrew kernels helped a lot but it wasn't until we replaced redhat with debian that the issues went away. to end ....i'll just say again that mandrake is good at being on the bleeding edge. redhat is too on the bleeding edge (gcc 2.96 and glibc 2.2). i like them to be, so their users can hit all the bugs and get them fixed before they touch my systems. most every distro has it's strengths. i'd be very happy if i could use debian potato for the next 5 years on my servers with seucrity updates and stuff. workstations need a bit more up to date software especially X. im a firm believer against the 'latest is greatest' idea that so many commercial software vendors like to implant in their customers. if there was backports of security fixes in the kernel i'd still be running 2.2.10 on most of my systems instead of 2.2.19+ow3 nate
