Howdy all!

Just have to jump in with my experiences with Debian... ;-)

--- Lex Spoon <lex at cc.gatech.edu> wrote:
> "Stephen Pair" <spair at advantive.com> wrote:
> > [Sorry about continuing this OT thread]
> > 
> > I was considering Debian, but it appeared to me that several packages
> > were a bit outdated.  It also seemed like they aren't up to the 2.4
> > kernel yet (which I need).  When I read a little more, I found a lot of
> > discussion about the quality of Debian  starting to suffer and
> > complaints about them not being able to keep up with the latest
> > packages.
> > 
> > Are these valid issues?
> > 
> > - Stephen
> 
> One thing to be aware of is that Debian has both "unstable" and "stable"
> release tracks.  If you want the newest software, you will simply need

And "testing" as Ross Boylan also pointed out.

> to use the "unstable" branch (which is actually pretty stable, in most
> people's experience!).  You may have been looking at the stable version.
> 
> On the other hand, in a lot of situations the newest software isn't
> needed, so it's nice to have that stable branch.  Furthermore, it doesn't
> stop you from compiling an occasional package by hand if you want!
> 
> I'll second that getting Debian installed can be frustrating, however.

Yes, but it depends. Sometimes it is easy. We run Debian on all our servers
(email, fileserver, webserver, firewall etc.) and I must say I simply love it.

In Debian you have "apt" (Advanced Package Tool) together with a very organized
package system with a lot of people maintaining it. This is the "secret" of Debian I think.

Having such a good packagesystem together with a lot of motivated package maintainers keeping
all those packages in such a good shape (prereqs, configs, making it play nice together etc)
makes maintaining a Debian box almost trivial.

Our admin has a cron script running "apt-get update; aptget-upgrade" with some other options
and then emailing him when new packages are available for upgrade. Some people even
install those automatically during the night.

An short example:

I had just installed a Debian machine and chosen few default packages. Shortly
I discovered that "Apache" wasn't installed. I tried:
"apt-get update" (which updates the package info cache)
and then "apt-get install apache". Wam, bam. Debian found the packages, downloaded them,
installed, fixed any startup/config files and restarted any daemons needed to be restarted.

Anyway - the importance and beauty of the package system in Debian can simply not be overstated.

My recommendations:

For a server, use stable and decide after a while if you really need testing
for them. We use stable with perhaps one or two selected packages pulled from testing
but that is rare. They are totally rock solid. Not one single incident of any kind yet.

For a workstation, use testing. My perception is that it is stable enough for most people.
When Debian says "stable" they mean rock-dead-stable not microsoft-reboot-every-week-stable.
So testing is probably stable and updated enough for a desktop.

Just the other day we bought a brand new Athlon and Jonas (our admin) pulled home 2 diskettes
for Debian, booted from those, set the ip+mask and installed the rest directly from the net.

It worked super and it autodetected GeForce2 etc. etc. But sure - Debian can get tricky
during install - but please don't let that stop you. Once it is installed it's a dream.

> -Lex, clearly a satisfied customer

Me too.

regards, Göran

PS. RedHat now have something called "Red Carpet" I think which is meant to be something similar
to apt-get but my feeling is that it isn't the technical solution which is important - it's having
these hordes of dedicated package maintainers with their focus on "doing it right". DS

=====
Göran Hultgren, goran.hultgren at bluefish.se
GSM: +46 70 3933950, http://www.bluefish.se
"Department of Redundancy department." -- ThinkGeek

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