I’ve been a Debianer over the long haul. I started somewhere back when still at Linuxcare when I got oh so tired of SuSE and RedHat. What got me then was this issue I had with rpm-hell. Here is how it went and perhaps it was on SuSE something that came with like 9000 CDs for an install. Probably before the easy DVD installs of these days. I wanted to upgrade Gnome on SuSE because that was what a person is supposed to do. But there were two tracks of rpm packages. There were some that another SuSE’r had made and then there were SuSE’s. The ones from SuSE were woefully old and since I liked the bleeding edge I wanted newer packages. I downloaded and installed the other set. Suddenly I had dependency resolution hell. There was a minor variance in this rather significant package called libGTK which caused all sorts of issues. It was like a minor number off or something but the applications all wanted something else. Geez. I fumed over it for awhile and was told to move to RedHat something. RedHat something has always been my downfall. I seem able to screw up a RedHat install very quickly just by not wanting all the crud they put in for a console-based server. Like why do I need X this and that anyways? For a server? Why do I need X at all? Why do I have to do a custom install to get rid of X? Questions that finally drove me away. At that point I was the Director of Linuxcare Labs so I enforced a debian standard on everyone; even the lab server. The lab server was a Dell PowerEdge 2450 and it ran Debian potato or whatever like a champ. Soon the other “lab rats” were running debian as well. One friend, Greg Kurtzer, based his Chaos distribution in part on his debian experiences or so he tells me.
But the real thing that became easy is that I stopped having that certain kind of Hell. I had a few other kinds of minor hells but I solved them all. One time, libpam managed to get seriously foobared in unstable and root logins would not work. My buddy DK was doing a install for a newbie and decided to do the “apt-get dist-upgrade” from a stable system. He got the borked libpam0g. Then to show off the power of Debian he did su and it would not work. We all broke down laughing in IRC that night but luckily many of us had root shells/terminals open and we left them that way. I also had sudo installed which is very nice. Always put sudo on things but guard its permissions in the /etc/sudoers file.
The lesson I learned over my long haul is that Debian simply rules. It does all the stuff I need with dependency resolution and even if it shows me some fire and brimstone on occasion, I still would choose it over anything else. Its just that much better. I’m always amazed by its demographics and the quality job its developers do building packages, making the distribution a thing of distinction, etc. Moving between versions has never really caused me problems but others seem to have had issues. For awhile, it was difficult to move from stable to unstable but now its easy.
If you want the easy road to Debian life, paved with small downloads of net installers; take the new sarge net installer and do it! Get yourself a 2.6 kernel though and the hardware support will shine!
Its debian after all…
