Well said reddazz.

One person may say that that the use of Debian as a base for many start-up distros is a measure of the quality of Debian.

I believe that one must also consider that if someone wanted an easy (in some cases lazy) way to have their 15 minutes of linux fame, riding on the coat-tails of Debian developement is one way to do it.

I think one also must consider the fact that if Debian was so "perfect", why do so many people feel the need to improve on it by creating distros that show their view of "what Debian SHOULD be doing". One could say Debian is the most forked distro ever made.

I agree with what you are saying regarding the duplication of effort, but I think Debian developers are in the same league as Gnome developers when is comes to open minded acceptance of contrary points of view. People may feel it's easier to beat them than it is to join them.

Perfection is in the eyes of the beholder I guess.

Refinersfire, there is no livecd as such of debina, although there are numerous livecd's based on debian. For example there is mepis, kanotic and knoppix plus many more.

Michael_aust,

Thanks for your knowledge on this issue. I am new to Linux and am trying to learn the differences between OS's and how they work. I'll try to find these OS's on the net and ebay...

You can download, burn your own Debian CDs at debian.org

Debian fresh LiveCD
http://live.debian.net/

nx5000,

Thank you for the link..!

Tho I am not sure which I should choose to download... I have all Dells running XP Pro right now, with both ATI Cards and Nvidia Video cards.. also they are all on wireless.. Thanks for any help..

here are my choices from your link..

[ ] debian-live-sid-i386-gnome.iso 15-Mar-2006 17:00 359M
[ ] debian-live-sid-i386-kde.iso 15-Mar-2006 15:27 377M
[ ] debian-live-sid-i386-xfce.iso 15-Mar-2006 23:19 175M
[ ] debian-live-sid-i386.iso 15-Mar-2006 14:45 111M

You want the 1st choice. I just installed Debian sid on my AMD64, and for the 1st time, it cleanly recognized my ATI cards and supplied suitable drivers. (Not the ATI proprietary ones, but nicely working xorg ati drivers).

For a newbie, Gnome is a little more user friendly than KDE ... a newbie fresh from Windows will die with xfce, and the other one appears to have no desktop at all.

One point most people seem to miss about Debian stable taking so long to update, is that Debian will run on several different types of systems not just x86, so the stable packages are stable on all systems not just x86. The same is true for testing, x86 is the most common so the bugs get worked out faster than on a s390 system.
Overview: Stable is stable on all hardware, Testing is a little buggy on some hardware, and Unstable is really buggy on some hardware.

rickh,

Thanks for the info, I will d/l it today and burn it.. I'll let you know how I make out..

Update.. got the file d/led and burned onto a cd. Booted it up, but run into a problem with how to log on.. would not take any combo of user name/password.. (root/guest/debian) Am now reading their web board to see what I should do.

As a side note.. just installed PCLinuxos (my first Linux install) on an old hard drive (which I added on another computer).. it went very fast and the boys are using it right now..

Long Live !

I've just bought a new box (AMD 3200+ Athlon 64) mainly so that I could try out several distros and still have a working system (Mandriva 2005) on my old Pentium 3.

I expected to have my initial choices up and running by now but am stumped mostly with getting the soundcard to work on either SuSE 10 or Mandriva 2006. (There are other problems with both distros that just should not be there - they have no business issuing newer versions while these are such a disgrace.)

I'm attracted to Debian for the sorts of reasons mentioned in previous posts. My doubt about it is: if Debian is using an old kernel, how can new hardware be detected and drivers supplied? If I try Debian now, will I just be getting the same problem over drivers, only worse?

Hi noranthon,

I'm using the testing version of Debian (Etch) and am very happy with it. Etch ships with the 2.6.15 kernel ( a new kernel); I found the hardware detection to be very good indeed with Etch.
Note: I would go with Etch rather than sarge as the software is newer. For example, Etch has Fire Fox 1.5.0.1 in the synaptic repositories.
I've had no negative issues with Etch:-)

Thanks. Etch seems to be the go. I currently use Firefox 1.5.0.2 on Mandriva 2005. I like to get the latest versions of such software (OpenOffice 2.0.2 is another) direct from the source.

No problem installing such on Mandriva and I trust I could do the same on Debian - I would not have to wait for Debian's etch repository to catch up? Firefox is a case in point - security breaches were detected in 1.5.0.1 and I had the freedom to go straight to Mozilla and download the newer version.

I object to the distros entwining other software with their OS, partly because it seems to be unnecessary duplication but also because it reminds me of the unethical use that MS has made of bundling. I prefer to see the distros making their OS technically available for independent installation of software.

Debian rules.

I have been running Debian Sid for the last to years. Before that I had absolutely no previous experience with Linux.

Current kernel 2.6.16, Firefox 1.5.0.3, Xorg 7.

Updates for apps like Firefox and Thunderbird usually show up with in a couple days of the Mozilla releases.

The fact that I have access to over 22k FREE apps is amazing.

Personally I don't see what the big fuss is when it comes to Release cycles. If you want newer apps you run Testing or Sid. The trick is to install apt-listbugs and keep an eye on the bugs that are listed. A lot of the time they are for weird things or different hardware so they are OK for me to install, other times I just wait a couple of days usually no more than a week and the bugs are gone.

I have in the last yr tried Xandros, Mandriva, FC 3, 4,5, Ubuntu Hoary and Breezy, Open Suse from beta 1 to the latest release,Gobolinux, PCLinuxOS, plus a ton of smaller ones and LiveCDs.

The Debian philosophy and package management system beats them all hand down.

Software isn't entwined , it is available in a repository that is available for download.

Debian brought me to Linux through a Kanotix livecd and I am still with it to this day. To all the devs of Debian I say keepup the great work. Just wish I had the know how to help.

I'm gonna put my head on the cutting block here guys

In all honesty, I truly would like to get debian going. I want to learn slack and debian to be honest.

But I've had the hardest times as a noobie two months ago & even now, to go to debian's site and do the following:

1. Figure out which distro is for me.
2. Find the download page for said distro.
3. Find an md5 checksum for said distro.
4. Find a cohesive install page.
5. Get past the black screen of death asking me how and what I want to install once I got this net-install cd.
6. Then after I get in to debian, it crashes?


I'll be honest guys, I've heard fantastic things about debian.

I've seen debian at work in Mepis (and loved it) & the small raw power it shows in DSL Linux

But I'll be darned if I can figure out how to install it.

The web-site really does not help me out at all as a non-debian user. It really seems geared toward the elite in Linux that use Debian. I really don't care about the different projects, who does what, release dates. How do I get it and install it. It's so confusing. I click on something that I think is a download page and I get a read-me file. What's going on? I dont even see a download link for etch.

These issues probably seem so miniscual to some as they've used this distro for a while, but it's a nightmare for me.