On Mon, Oct 30, 2000 at 11:37:28AM +1100, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> <quote who="Doug Stalker">
>
> > If there a guide anywhere titled "Debian for people who have had a lot
> > of experience using Redhat and redhat like linux distributions like
> > Mandrake who now wish to change to Debian"?
>
>
> Yep. It's:
>
> man <everything>
just to expand on this a bit -- EVERYTHING in Debian has a man page.
Well, some things have a default man page which tells you other
places to find info, but most things have actual manpages. It's a
common thing for the person making Debian packages to go and write a
manpage for a package if it doesn't already have one.
To prove how anal Debian people are about this, I've received
manpages for things as simple as Tractorgen
(http://www.vergenet.net/~conrad/software/tractorgen/)
from various people bent enough to package them.
They (Debian developers) are also anal about making sure that
packages have explicit licensing and contain README files and so on
to put in /usr/doc.
This all comes out of Debian being a huge community process (hence
having enough resources to go through with all this) and that it has
strict policy guidelines.
> apt-cache search <blah> (to find cool packages)
> apt-cache show <blah> (to read more about those packages)
apt-cache is cool, it knows about all the packages that exist. It's
very much like having a local mirror of Freshmeat's software index
on your own box, and once you find something you want you just go
apt-get install gfoo
or whatever rather than screwing around with finding the latest
version and downloading it by hand.
> But, I have to admit, the best way of learning all the intricacies and cool
> tools is to have a rabid Debian user to refer to. Gus, Conrad and Anand have
> been my (very well qualified) converters. :)
bah, Gus and Anand got me using it, I trust their judgement because
they're kickass sysadmins and can explain why everything works the
way it does, and it gives them real power for adminning systems and
networks.
I use it for quite the opposite reason -- I'm a lazy sysadmin, and I
like all that to get out of my face so I can spend my time coding
and so on (yes, even doing stuff that doesn't involve sitting in front
of a computer!).
that said, I'm writing this from a RedHat box. It's all good.
Conrad.
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