> deb is not a magic bullet for packaging. dpkg and apt-get are easy to > break. What makes debian's distro work great is that they follow their > policy and try to avoid breaking stuff. > > I had some bad experince with storm linux (2.0.6), which was (the company > is now out of business) a debian-based distro. > > All I wanted was to compile some gtk-based programs. I needed to install > the gtk-dev package (or is it libgtk1.2-dev? whatever). But the storm CD > did no include it. So I wanted to grab the package from the near-by debian > potato mirror, but then it turned out that they were using a version of > gtk from helix-gnome, and since it was of a higher version than potato's > one (but much lower than the one currently availble at helix) I could not > simply apt-get it.
What are you talking about? I, for example, wanted to install xchat on it and I decided to compile it - so I did apt-get to grab from a nearby woody mirror the gtk stuff, the gcc stuff (you don't get gcc installed, nor ssh, nor telnet because it's aimed to the dumb user) - and I compiled it and it worked perfectly. > The way I saw it, I had a number of alternatives, and all of them invloved > changes to core system libraries (and hence a source of trouble, and not > suggested to a newbie): > > * rebuild the potato glib and gtk packages for my system > * Grab the newer-than-unstable packages from helix. Upgrade > all of gnome, and some other components along the way. [no, > thank you, I have better ways to ruin my system] > * Try to force the use of the potato -dev packages [probably a bad idea] Tzafrir, I don't consider myself an expert in Debian stuff - Adi, Ira, Marc and some others are way better then me on this - but I'm sure you can mix and match from potato and woddy. I don't see your point here. I managed to compile gtk application within 5 minutes. > You can count of Lindows to use some non-standard packages. I wouldn't be > surprised if they used their own X packages, helix-gnome, and oher > non-standard debian components. I leave it as an exercise to you to try to > install some missing packages on that system. You'll be surprised, but other then some modifications to KDE and LILO, as well as some fonts (they have iso10646 fixed fonts, which is nice), I didn't have any problems installing stuff from debian woody, including gimp, torso, ksnapshot, ssh, gcc, and some other applications to make it work like I love to work on linux. > Nothing is wrong with that. It's the overhead I have problems with... You can skip it entirely - ifconfig for network did the trick for me before I looked and find their tcp/ip configurations in kcontrol. > As for "more stable": I have yet to see it. So far from my tests - it seems to be very stable. Hetz ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
