tristian radford wrote:
Hi i just wanted to know some info on debian my friend at college
tells me all about it and he says it all good but what it is i was
thinking about using debian (im currenly using mandrake) because it
has its own installer which makes it easyer to get things and i head
alot of good things about "app get". But i heard that debian is pretty
hard to install and I just wanted to get the low down details.
Well the main reason why I want to use debian is because Yahoo has
made an official messenger and as the latest version of gaim is broken
its beginning to get me annoyed and with an official version of yahoo
my mum will be pleased (im only 16 so it still normal to live at home
;) ).
Hello Tristian,
you can find alot about debian on our website:
http://www.debian.org
Here are some reasons why you could use debian:
- Its entirely community-supported, ie. there's no large company behind
it giving out new releases. Rather, its a bunch of friends doing all the
release and development stuff.
- It is free (in the sense free speech, not free beer)
- Its there for 11 different architectures. The 'same' debian that runs
on your box will run on the biggest IBM Mainframe
(http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/eserver/zseries/800linux.html, e.g). So if
you can use it on your box, you could -potentially - also operate it on
such a mainframe (your bank surely has one or two of those standing around)
- There are three versions out there, 'stable', 'testing' and 'unstable'
(codenamed 'woody', 'sarge' and 'sid' at the moment). Stable gets
security updates, but is frozen otherwise, so most of the applications
will be too old for your taste. 'Unstable' gets all the newest software,
but it is the developer release, so it breaks often. 'Testing' is
mid-way, so its quite usable with mostly recent packages. On the
downside, it does not get security updates regularly, but rather you'll
have to wait the usual ten days till the new version trickles in from
'unstable.
And here are a few reasons why using debian is tricky:
- Mandrake has a nice-looking graphical installer that guides you
through all the process. Debian's installer is text-based, asks alot
more questions, and generally requires you to know more about your
computer than Mandrake does.
- 'apt-get' (which has also been ported to Mandrake, btw) allows you to
install or remove packages. It will automattically satisfy dependencies,
and fetch the packages from the net. Since this is so neat, Debian
people use it alot, so most of the Debian Installation and Maintenance
tools are text-based, commandline tools (not those stylish graphical
tools mandrake has).
- If you want ot stay up to date (with the testing, or unstable
distributions), you'll find that debian fetches a lot of soware from the
net.
- Some software is free (you are free to use it for anythng you like,
you are free to analyse it how it works, to adapt it, and ofc you can
share the original or the adapted version with anyone you like), other
software is not quite as free. Debian is rather strict about this
distinction, and some things that you find in Mandrake (like for example
Java), you'll have to get from third parties in debian (since Java is
not free).
If you want an example of what debian might look like:
- Morphix (http://www.morphix.org) is based on debian, but optimised to
run off a CD. I think there's a Gamer ISO at
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/morphix/MorphixCombined-Gamer-0.4-1.iso?download
- Knoppix (http://www.knoppix.org) is another live-CD distribution
largely based on debian
And if you like debian, and want to contribute, you can also become a
developer and become part of the project.
Robert
What I do for debian is I maintain a search engine for local webpages
