At risk of starting a flamewar... I currently use Slackware and never have a problem with it, in fact that's pretty much the only Linux distribution I've ever used. I am, however, for various reasons considering switching distributions. The only distro I am actually giving any serious consideration to at this time is Debian. It is unlikely this switch will happen anytime soon as I generally don't touch the box from an administrative standpoint as long as it doesn't need a) security updates or b) the power goes out which is to say not that often, my uptimes averaging somewhere around 5-6 months or so. Currently at 4 so if things play out as normal I've got a couple months before I touch anything.
Anyways, I have some projects I want to do which are going to mean some serious intervention on the administrative end installing a ton of new software and packages, etc. and if I'm going to switch distributions the time to do it would be before I go to all that trouble and then have to do it all over again if I decide to switch. Main current usage is: Command-line only, no X installed, so the whole x 4.4 license thing is a non-issue here. Apache, PHP, MySQL. Exim, courier-imap gcc and occasionally g++ I note that debian does have a package for series 3.x of exim where slackware has no support, but series 3 is so far behind current now as to not be funny, so no real change there. I will still be building and maintaining that from source it would seem. I know Debian tends to err on the safe side on these kinds of things and that exim is probably not one of their top priorities as sendmail or some such mailer is probably default, but in general how far back can one expect the stable release of debian to be for most packages? Also, how does this affect security and how are security issues handled and patched in Debian? Are the patches backported into previous versions or does one need to update via compiling source should one deem a security vulnerability a serious threat to their system? Are security updates thrown into the test tree first or are they placed in stable? I have seen conflicting reports when googling around for info. If thrown in test I would assume I can mix and match packages from test and stable as I see fit. The package management in Debian will obviously make life much easier than in Slackware as long as custom compilation is not needed, but I am wondering if this will really be an advantage? Do most major projects have a .deb package available? If not, what community resources are available to find deb packages from? For example Slackware has http://linuxpackages.net. What difficulties/differences am I likely to run into in the switch from Slackware to Debian if I decide to go? Additionally is there a listing of which packages reside on which cd's? I see that cd 1 is install/most popular, cd 2 is less popular, cd 3 even less popular packages, etc... but I haven't located a listing of actual packages on each cd yet. The less cd's I need the better. And no, I don't want the net install cd :P Please only respond if you have used both distributions and/or have an answer to one of the questions I asked here, hopefully that can keep the Slackware vs. Debian flaming to a minimum as it appears they both have their advantages and disadvantages over one another to me and are among the best distributions available in my opinion. --- Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.637 / Virus Database: 408 - Release Date: 3/20/2004 _______________________________________________ PDXLUG mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://pdxlug.org/mailman/listinfo/pdxlug
