On Fri, Jan 28, 2005 at 07:09:07AM -0800, John Sechrest wrote: > % I would like to have a look at Knoppix Hacks at some point as I am > % beginning to conclude the only way to get a reasonably sane Linux > % distribution is to do it myself. I still have most of the skills needed > % to do that, but I no longer have quite all of them, and I definitely > % haven't got the time. Knoppix 3.7 or some Morphix based thing is probably > % a more reasonable starting place given my time constraints and slightly > % dated skillset. > > What is missing from the default sarge install that you find a problem? > > Or what configuration issue are important to you that knoppix > has or that ubutoo has that debian does not have?
You want something damning against Debian? As a former developer: Debian currently supports 13 architectures, if not more. These include old Amigas, Ataris, and Motorola 68000 systems. BEFORE a security fix is made, it must be compiled for each of these and preferably tested. That means you have to wait for someone's Atari Falcon to compile the security fix before you can get it on an ia32, x86-64, or PowerPC system. This takes about a week, on average. (After all, if compiling X take hours on an "old" 1GHz P4, how long do you think it's going to take on a 16MHz Atari--or even a 66MHz overclocked Amiga? Debian contains some 15,000 packages nowadays, as I understand it. Before they can release anything, they have decided that it must all work on all 13 architectures. On February 7th, 2002, I posted a message in reply to a new feature in dpkg which would be enabled AFTER Debian's next release (sarge). I replied that it was ridiculous to hold back an important feature for the next three years, because I predicted it would take that long for sarge to ever be released. Some time after, I figured that by the middle of this year, we'd see Linux 2.8 kernels, XFree86 4.5, and Debian using a 2.4 kernel. For saying such things, I was flamed. Mercilessly. And rightly so--I was wrong. XFree86 4.5 is really called X.org and Linux 2.8 hasn't materialised. Sarge hasn't been released yet, and Debian stable uses a 2.2 kernel still. Ubuntu seems nice enough, although it is basically Gnome Linux. If you don't intend to use Gnome, there's probably not much point to Ubuntu. Knoppix uses KDE by default, but isn't tied to it in any way, and the really nice thing about Knoppix is that it and its slightly more flexible brother Morphix are designed to be a bootable Linux system on CD that can be installed into a reasonably current and reasonably coherent Debian- based system. Both it and Ubuntu pull things out of Debian that actually work and target them for achitectures people will actually be using. _______________________________________________ EUGLUG mailing list [email protected] http://www.euglug.org/mailman/listinfo/euglug
