On Monday 18 February 2002 10:29 pm, Francis Pineda wrote: > Greetings Debian Community! > > I am currently a computer networking student researching different flavours > of Unix/Linux. From the advice of my instructor, I have shosen to research > Debian. He says it's, "Really Cool" I find it very appealing and hope to > install it as soon as my system is set up. > > I have a few specific questions I'd like to ask. The information on your > webpage and FAQ is simply so immense, a simple site search is a bit > confusing. > > 1. What is the user base targeted? Is it simply geared towards the > home-user looking for a free OS? Or is it geared more towards the > power-user? > > 2. Where is Debian located? I understand there are over 800 distrubuters > nationwide that communicate via e-mail and message boards. But is there a > specific "home" to debian?
please. you can't possible have made it here without prior awareness of debian.org. > > 3. What is the latest Kernel version? > > 4. What is the default desktop? and what others are included? > > 5. What, if any, office suites are included? > > ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- paste from a post that originally appeared on debian-kde ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1) Who you are, what you do in real life, how you got involved in Debian, and involved in KDE, what (if anything) you packaged in Debian before this, what (if anything) you did in KDE before this, why & how you came to the decision to take on maintainership of the KDE packages. 2) What do you see as the time frame for upcomming Debian/KDE milestones? Such as: A) What is the plan/roadmap/future for KDE related things in Debian? the metapackage (or, what is it called now? Task?) of kde vs of kdebase. B) What's up w/ KOffice for Debian? Re: Woody or Sid? C) What's your recommendation regarding: would you advise people who want to be making productive use of KDE now to run Woody or Sid? D) What's up w/ KDE 3? - When, and for whom, should persons trying to make actual daily use of KDE begin to use KDE3? Can KDE2 & KDE3 be put onto the same system, and switched between? Is it necessary to do a complete separate Debian install, (one for KDE2 & one for KDE3) on the harddisk if one wants to be able to try switch between 2 & 3? I ask these questions since I'd like to make some judgements about what to put in the KDE HowTo I'm developing. For instance, I'd like to have good data to base a decision on regarding: should I suggest, (and write it from the perspective of) persons run Woody, and if necessary pull packages from Sid? Or, is & will Sid be basically enough free of substantial problems that it would be better for most people trying to do productive work with KDE that they run Sid, in order to have the latest features? (For instance, two areas I'm currently possibly affected by are: 1) Kghostview - does the Sid version fix a major problem? 2) kde vs kdebase - does Sid have a kde package that provides many more features (& thus involves much less sw installation time/effort) than Woody?) It would be much appreciated if you would each free up some of your valueable time to each answer the above questions for all here who are interested in the future of KDE on Debian! -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- end of paste -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- hmmm. sounds like deja vu all over again. yo, francis, you don't mind if i cc this to chris cheney and daniel stone, do you? in fact, i think i will, anyway. btw, what part of phoenix do you live in? at which college, where instructors refer to debian as being really cool, are you a student? or, more to the point, which part of the salary paying machine do you work for? your questionnaires totally reek of factory training and, most especially, of insincerity. a genuine correspondent would hang a while and read the list, and would, above all, not pretend to be unaware of debian.org. the reason for my suspicion of you is that, in the past, you've displayed an inability to accord due respect for those who make debian possible, to those who actually give up real time in their own lives to support a principle and an ethic that you have apparently sold to the highest bidder. your contempt betrays your origin. the irony is that you will be, nonetheless, welcomed here, and aided in understanding that there is nothing that your masters can do about free software. not only will it continue to happen but those who finance your activities have already conceded its victory by clamoring to acquire patents on damn near everything that they can steal from here. i don't expect you to be able to convince your masters of the hopelessness of their desire for hegemony, but you, at least, given the history of your experience here, should know by now that the games, as they are played where you come from, have no significant meaning here. it's free--i.e. it will happen, it is happening. it will happen, and does happen, organically, in a human fashion, refelecting the way that free humans, everywhere, interact with each other. perhaps that's the biggest distinction between where your attitude is rooted and this place in which you, purportedly, desire to be active. it will always happen as the consequence of a process of agreement between the participants, and not, anymore, because of the harsh economic rules that determine the quality of success where you come from. if you take the time--just a bit more than the time you needed to know that debian.org is the fulcrum of what this is about--you'll see that this is all about the preservation of community, whereas what you come from, wherever, in fact. you come from, is, apparently, about exclusion. that attitude of "give me the facts and give me them now" doesn't work here--not because anyone is unwilling to share what they know but because what they know has already been represented by their posts. there is nothing you can exact by infusing your requests with either urgency or flattery that isn't already available through the archives or through perusal of the list. are you getting it, yet. it's free. get your head around that. i realize that becoming one of us might put you in a dodgy position with respect to the obligations your masters have impressed upon you, but, hey, that's fundamentally your problem, and not ours. all you have to do here is be respectful. all you have to lose is the chains of your subservience. you can even keep the income, as long as you drop the pretence. ben
