Mark Komarinski said:
> Tony Lambiris wrote:
> >
> > Benjamin Scott wrote:
> >
> >
> > I can't understand why people hate Debian's installer so much. It's very
> > straight-forward, and as long as you know a little about your system (at least the
> > module you use for your ethernet device), Debian will install no problem. What do
> > you mean they have to play catch up? Their installer works, so what do they need
> > to catch up?
>
> Debian isn't the most user-friendly to use or set up. I went through the
> process of "upgrading" from potato to woody this weekend. It took
> somewhere
> around 4 hours of downloading, complaining about pre-depends, and blowing
> away about
> 1/2 of my system before it was done. And I'd like to think I know a bit
> about Linux.
> Installation before ISOs were available was a PAIN(!) to do. I tried
> Debian last
> October and went back to RH 7.0 - even with the problems, it was easier to
> install
> and use RH than Debian.
Hm. I did the upgrade shortly after I installed potato on my home system (on
a 25K connection, no less). Took about 12 hours, but most of that was
downloading. Of course, this was when woody was still unstable, and not too
long after potato came out (I upgraded last October, been running an
unstable/testing system ever since). The only things I have on that were
slight problems were the fact that I self-compiled my kernel (since Debian
currently does not install SMP, plus I like to build a system with support for
only what I have), and Applix (and I actually provided a test case for them in
building their scripting to do a debian install from their RPMS on disk).
Guess each system is different. Mine's a dual PPro 166 (overclocked to 200),
Tyan motherboard, with IDE HD, SCSI JAZ Drive and CD Jukebox, Advansys SCSI
card, S3 video card (the biggest pain on the system - last S3 I buy).
I also run a mangled system here (debian, with bits from woody, progeny, storm
(alas, not as much, they seem to be not maintaining their stuff, thank
goodness for progeny), and some pieces like galeon & abiword direct from the
developers. I did have a few problems here early on when woody became
testing, and I tried to merge too much unstable.
>
> Don't get me wrong - Debian is very nice and has some real advantages over
> Red Hat. But there's no way that Debian can become more popular than Red
> Hat while
> it has these core anti-newbie issues. Red Hat has spent a lot of time
> making
> apps for new users - take printtool, or netcfg. AFAIK, Debian has neither.
>
> > > I find RPM seems to make the process of simply installing a bunch of
> > > packages easier than dpkg. dpkg got itself tied into knots W.R.T. dependency
> > > ordering on large installs when I tried Debian 2.2.
> >
> > I don't know what you mean here. It's so obnoxious when you install an RPM, to
> > have it tell you it has missing dependencies (like libcrypto.so) or such, where as
> > apt-get will show you the dependencies you need, download them for you, and
> > install them, if you wish.
>
> ...assuming you're using the right "version" of Debian. Most packages
> require you
> to use "unstable". RPMs at least are a bit more neutral WRT this, plus the
> fact
> that RPMs can be PGP signed, and you can quickly check a system using rpm
> -Va
Hm. Haven't seen that too much recently. There was a time in early Jan, when
they did the roll-back of woody to potato as they went from unstable/stable to
unstable/testing/stable. That's when my problems started, since I already had
some pieces on here, but not others. For the most part, they've gone away as
stuff rolls from unstable to testing.
Agree that signing is a good thing, and I hope it's on the way for debian.
One problem is that, thanks to testing, most binary packages are not actually
built by the maintainer, but by the build machines (there's been a lot of
discussions on the debian-devel list about this, and how you handle signing of
binaries built by machine). There is an md5sum for each package, so you can
ensure the package you got matches what you were supposed to get.
Having said all this, I also have a RH system (laptop). If you like it, go
for it. Choice is good.
>
> I'd like to see a packaging system with the ease-of-use and functionality
> of
> RPM with the networkability (is that a word?) of .deb. Doesn't sound like
> up2date does it.
>
Keep watching. Connectiva has released an apt for RPMs (they're a brazilian
distro).
jeff
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Jeffry Smith Technical Sales Consultant Mission Critical Linux
[EMAIL PROTECTED] phone:603.930.9739 fax:978.446.9470
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Thought for today: greenbar n.
A style of fanfolded continuous-feed paper
with alternating green and white bars on it, especially used in
old-style line printers. This slang almost certainly dates way back
to mainframe days.
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